Latest news with #KiyoshiKurosawa
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Kurosawa You May Never Have Heard Of
'Who are you?' the enigmatic young man central to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1997 breakthrough horror thriller, 'Cure,' repeatedly asks. He's been accused of hypnotizing people and prompting them to commit gruesome murders. That deceptively simple question might be the paramount concern in the cinema of Kurosawa, the prolific Japanese filmmaker whose unnerving, genre-defying films are often preoccupied with questioning or revealing the true identity of their characters — to us and to them. One could say that Kurosawa is to psychological fright what David Cronenberg is to body horror. In 'Charisma' (1999), about a detective stranded in a rural community obsessed with a singular tree, he asks what makes some people special and others just ordinary. In 'Cure' (streaming on the Criterion Channel), he ponders whether the victims of hypnosis are innate killers or coerced puppets. And in his chilling 2001 internet ghost story 'Pulse' (streaming on Tubi), his young characters wonder if they are alone or just lonely. In each of these narratives, the weight of society influences the individual. Kurosawa seems perpetually interested in that tug of war between our free will and the status quo. The supernatural or eerie elements often read like catalysts that incite an inner reckoning. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Japanese Thriller ‘Cloud', ‘Drowning Dry' From ‘Flow' Producer & ‘No Sleep Till' Take Indie Bow
This summer specialty weekend is offering a handful of limited releases from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud to Unicorns by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, to the latest in the Jujutsu Kaisen series, Drowning Dry co-produced by Flow Academy award-winner Matiss Kaza and a handful of thoughtful docs. It's a buzzy, busy box office with lots to see from Superman on down. Ari Aster's Eddington from A24 is wide on 2,000 screens. Sideshow/Janus Films opens thriller by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) in NYC at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center. Premiered at Venice, see Deadline review, 92% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Yoshii, an ambitious yet directionless young factory worker from Tokyo, side hustles in the murky realm of black market reselling, cheating buyers and sellers alike. After swindling his way into loads of cash, he becomes slowly disconnected to humanity, moving out of the city, shunning his girlfriend, and hiring a devoted assistant. But after a series of mysterious, sinister incidents occur, he begins to suspect his former victims could be plotting the ultimate revenge. Expands to LA and select other markets next week followed by a national rollout through August. More from Deadline 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Scares Up $2.2M In Previews, 'Eddington' $625K - Box Office 'Superman' Will Fly Over The Heads Of 'Smurfs' & Posh Peeps Who Did Things Last Summer With $60M Second Weekend - Box Office Preview 'Eddington' Actor Matt Gomez Hidaka Joins Josh Trank's 'Send A Scare' Horror Thriller Dekanalog opens by Laurynas Bareiša (Pilgrims), co-produced by Academy Award-Winner Matiss Kaza (Flow) opens at the IFC Center, Q&As with Bareiša moderated by Ryan Lattanzio. Limited rollout to LA and other markets through mid-August. Mixed martial arts competitor Lukas has just handily defeated his opponent and celebrates with his wife, child and friends backstage, setting the scene for a nimble combination of communal bonding and looming horrors. A non-linear journey through the experiences and recollections of those who survived tragedy and those who didn't. The second of Bareiša's films selected as Lithuania's entry for the Best International Feature Academy Award and winner of Locarno's Best Director and Best Performance awards. The New Directors/New Films 2025 selection stars Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela and Paulius Markevičius. Cohen Media Group is brining TIFF 2023-premiering by director Sally El Hosaini and actor James Krishna Floyd (Hulu's No Man's Land) to the Quad in New York, the Landmark LA and arthouses in San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and Philadelphia. BAFTA-nominated and multiple film festival award-winning El Hosaini's last film Swimmers was a worldwide hit for Netflix. Unicorns stars Ben Hardy (Bohemian Rhapsody, 6 Underground, X-Men: Apocalypse) as a working class, single dad auto mechanic who has a Crying Game moment after a chance encounter with an alluring British Asian drag queen (recording artist and performer Jason Patel) at an underground club in East London. Screened at BFI London, Palm Springs, London Flare and Dinard British Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and the Audience Award. Most recently screened as part of the Hollywood Partnership Pride LIVE! events in June. by Alexandra Simpson opens at Metrograph in New York. Q&As with writer-director Simpson and producer Tyler Taormina on Fri. and Sat. From Omnes Films collective (Christmas Eve In Miller's Point) and Factory 25. Premiered at Venice to a Special Jury Mention and screened at Los Angeles Festival of Movies and New Directors/New Films. This visually striking feature is a hypnotic take on a disaster movie and portrait of the inhabitants of a coastal Florida town as they prepare for a hurricane, including a handful of locals who decide to stay despite the evacuation order. The film is fully cast with local actors from Florida who had never acted before. Fourth Act Film opens , a documentary by by Sam Feder. Follows civil rights attorney Chase Strangio as he battles at the Supreme Court for transgender adolescents' access to gender-affirming healthcare, confronting not only the legal system but also a media landscape that distorts public perception and threatens the struggle for trans rights. Premiered at Sundance, see Deadline Studio interview with Feder. Screenings this month in New York, LA and San Francisco. GKids released with special event screenings on Wednesday and Thursday on 1,187 screens in the U.S. and Canada with limited screenings continuing through the weekend on about 350 screens. This theatrical compilation feature returns to the popular Hidden Inventory/Premature Death story arc of the globally acclaimed Jujutsu Kaisen series, which focused on the younger days of fan-favorite characters Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. Documentary by Reid Davenport opens at the Film Forum. In 1983, a disabled Californian woman named Elizabeth Bouvia sought the 'right to die,' igniting a national debate about autonomy, dignity, and the value of disabled lives. After years of courtroom trials, Bouvia disappeared from public view. Disabled director Davenport narrates this investigation of what happened to Bouvia and her story's relevance today. Davenport's exploration brings him to Canada, where safeguards have been lifted to allow disabled people unprecedented access to Medical Aid in Dying (MAID). Here Davenport on Deadline's Doc Talk Podcast. From Multitude Films/Independent Lens. 8 Above opens Justin Schein'sat the IFC Center this week and the Laemmle LA next with other cities to follow. A doc about family, wealth, inequality and the American Dream viewed through the lens of the estate tax and the very personal story of a father and son at odds over what kind of inheritance we want to leave our kids and our country. Schein's father, Harvey Schein, liked to say he lived the so-called American Dream – rising from poverty in Depression-era Brooklyn to great financial success as one of America's top CEOs of the 1970s. But Harvey Schein, who ran the American arm of Sony for many years, also spent the last 20 years of his life fixated on trying to keep his hard-earned wealth from the taxman—an obsession that almost broke the Schein family apart. More broadly, inherited wealth and the tax system that shields it have badly distorted American democracy, perpetuating racial and economic inequity in the country. Filmed over more than 20 years and weaving intimate family footage with interviews with prominent experts from all sides of the debate. MORE Best of Deadline The Movies That Have Made More Than $1 Billion At The Global Box Office 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Everything We Know About 'Stranger Things' Season 5 So Far
Wall Street Journal
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Cloud' Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Saga of Resale and Revenge
At the beginning of this century, in the era of AOL and the dot-com bubble, the Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed 'Pulse,' an early, eerie entry in the annals of internet-minded cinema. It was a ghost story in which the virtual world existed as a sort of porous spiritual dimension for lost souls, and it saw in the internet a false promise of connection that, anticipating the alienating effects of social media, proved prescient. Now, more than two decades later, Mr. Kurosawa has made a film for today's web-weary age with the thriller 'Cloud.' The protagonist is Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who works at a factory while pursuing wealth on the side as an online reseller. We meet him inspecting a load of 'therapy devices,' potential stock for his web store, and giving the owner a lowball offer that is resignedly accepted. He loads them into his van, heads home, takes pictures of a device in his makeshift product-photography studio, and posts them for sale—more than two dozen at 200,000 yen (or about $1,300) each. They sell out in a matter of minutes. But it's the way he watches this that's telling: from a safe distance, sitting across the room from his monitor, not so much a computer user as an awed spectator, wary of something lashing out from the world within the screen.
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Cloud' Review: Buyer's Remorse
Just as Yoshii (Masaki Suda), sitting on the bus with his girlfriend, is beginning to dream about a better future early on in 'Cloud,' the camera gradually inches over, and the outline of a dark figure suddenly hovers over him. Things go deathly quiet and Yoshii turns, but the figure has dashed off the bus. It's the kind of breathtaking moment you'd expect from the writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose breakout masterpiece, 'Cure' (1997), showcased his virtuosic control of tension and atmosphere. That consummate formal ability has one ready to follow the eclectic Japanese auteur wherever this taut suspense might take us, even if, in this latest work, it might end up in some disjointed directions. Here, Kurosawa's story of what might initially appear to be sinister morphs boldly and almost irreverently into a tale of slapstick vengeance that carries with it whiffs of Michael Haneke's 'Funny Games' and Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs.' Underneath all that is perhaps something sinister still, though not from an expected place. As an online reseller who poaches just about any product he can find to sell at a higher price, Yoshii has recently had a windfall, selling a batch of medical devices. He quits his factory day job and moves to a house in the woods with his girlfriend, hoping to expand his business. Yet, eerie instances have him looking over his shoulder, and his dubious reselling practices begin to attract enemies. The gears switch hard in the film's second half, as Yoshii's karmic retribution comes knocking. But the gunslinging that ensues is not slick nor even particularly gruesome. This is the story of desperate men, pummeled by failure and itching for violent catharsis; although mostly what they get is clumsy death. That incongruence, in the movie's eyes, embodies the distinction and friction between the digital world and the real one. Online, everyone represents either cash to be made (at seemingly every turn of real and present danger, Yoshii is still just thinking of his rinky-dink hustle) or a scapegoat for one's anger. But in the physical world, those visions of revenge play out differently. Often, at decisive moments, these characters take on the persona of a villain, shouting out their machinations like they would on an online forum, only for reality to bluntly knock them over the head. It's a surprisingly funny film in that way, but also disturbing. For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity's capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us. But that subtext gets muddled in the director's primary desire to construct playful surprises, even if some of which, particularly by the end, can be wonderfully, terrifyingly strange. Ultimately, 'Cloud' is constructing a highway to hell for Yoshii in which the demons are not phantom, but us. CloudNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters.
Globe and Mail
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Dark and stormy Japanese thriller Cloud is an excellent exploration of a market driven by greed
Cloud Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa Starring Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa and Daiken Okudaira Classification N/A; 124 minutes Opens in select theatres, including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, July 18 Critic's Pick Buy low, sell high might be the mantra of Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a Tokyo factory worker whose off hours are spent in the grey-market world of online resale, and whose struggles are the focus of the excellent new thriller Cloud. But the economic maxim might also apply to Cloud's own writer-director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. If you bought stock in the filmmaker back during his early, perhaps more disreputable days working in Japan's pink-film and V-Cinema genres (essentially, direct-to-video erotic thrillers and yakuza flicks), then you'd be a rich cinephile today, given that Kurosawa is now widely regarded as his country's greatest, and slipperiest, working auteur. After spending the past few years experimenting with period drama (2020's Wife of a Spy) and French-language cinema (last year's remake of Serpent's Path), Kurosawa inches back toward the knotted-stomach dread of his horror classics Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) with Cloud, albeit accented this time with a healthily morbid sense of humour. And, perhaps more surprising, a serious affinity for action movie shoot-outs. The title 'Cloud' most likely refers to the digital storage infrastructure that Yoshii relies upon for his moonlighting gig, a sly bit of retail rigging that involves exploiting small business owners by buying up their wares (sometimes legitimate, sometimes counterfeit) in bulk, then reselling them on an eBay-like website for a significant markup. But the film's title might as well refer to the increasingly ominous environment which surrounds Yoshii. Once he quits his 9-to-5 job and moves his expanding resale operation out of Tokyo and into the countryside – his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) follows dutifully – the shades of Yoshii's life begin to darken significantly. At first, it is difficult to pinpoint what changes and when. Is the turning point when Yoshii hires a suspiciously enthusiastic assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira)? Or perhaps when Yoshii has an unfriendly run-in with a local police officer after a seemingly random act of vandalism on his rural property? Kurosawa dials the dread up slowly and steadily, until Yoshii finds himself the target of the world's most disgruntled customers. If Kurosawa is asking his audience to empathize with Yoshii, he's got a funny way of doing it. Motivated only by the amount of yen in his bank account, the character is a difficult one to root for. But then again, his aggrieved customers are driven by their own sordid, selfish desires – the thugs have spent unknown hours successfully 'doxing' Yoshii's real identity, but wear masks to clumsily protect their own. By the film's haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa's sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.
