Mio on the Shore (Japan, 2019)

20-year-old Mio has lost her parents early and runs a traditional Japanese inn in Nagano with her grandmother. As her grandmother gets sick and hospitalized, Mio is forced to leave the inn and reluctantly comes to Tokyo to live with her father's old friend Kyosuke. Helping him at the bathhouse he runs, she begins to find her way in everyday life.

Mio on the Shore doesn't strive to be the most original film of the year, but its personal scope is one of its biggest strengths. With some breathtaking cinematography, equally dedicated to shots of mountains and landscapes as to people and the smallest of emotions, director Ryutaro Nakagawa weaves a spellbinding story of how Mio is trying to find her way through a new existence.   

Genre: Drama. 1h 36min.

Howl from Beyond the Fog (Japan, 2019)

During the Meiji era, a blind girl named Takiri and a monster called Nebula fight against greedy developers who threaten to take over her family's land.

Howl from Beyond the Fog felt like the Loch Ness story filtered through a Japanese kaiju filter. In just a little over half an hour, Howl tells the story how a huge sea monster is siding with a young girl. Another thing, the cast are all played by puppets. It really fits the theme of the movie and it becomes entertaining on an another level. Director Daisuke Sato worked on the special effects for several Godzilla films and I'm guessing this was a dream project of his finally coming to life.  

Genre: Animation/Short/Fantasy. 35 min.

So Long, My Son (China, 2019)

 

Yaoyun and his wife Liyun once had a happy family - until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his 'foreign' parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories.

So Long, My Son has everything that matters for me in a film. The outstanding performances by the actors hits every mark, and the actress who plays the mother is especially good. This story also demanded that high level acting to be as effective as it could be. So Long, My Son is an epic family drama about that big gap in our lives when someone passes away, set against the backdrop of China's tumultuous history and changing society. We're jumping back in time to get glimpses of events that will have such strong impact many years later, and after following the couple for so long the emotional weight of some scenes are absolutely devastating. All this would have amounted to a great film, but we also have the beautiful cinematography and composed camerawork which do huge favors for the heavy story. A long sit at barely over three hours, but well worth your time if you value true to life storytelling and what you get out of watching a film.  

Genre: Drama

Moonlit Winter (South Korea, 2019)

Yoon-Hee lives with her teenage daughter Sae-Bom. On a winter day, Yoon-Hee receives a letter from Otaru, Japan. Sae-Bom accidentally reads the letter and learns about her mother's first love, which she never spoke about before.

Moonlit Winter starts out like many films before it, but it still gets its hooks in you. Despite South Korea's yearning for sappy melodrama the film avoids desperate attempts at making the viewers cry, yet it has a strong emotional impact and towards the end it culminated beautifully accompanied by a lovely score. Great performances and a director who knew exactly how to pace the film makes it a great watch, not something that will blow you away but every once in a while you see a drama that makes it seem so simple to make you care abut the characters and that's always what I'm looking for. 

Genre: Drama/Romance

Family Romance, LLC (Japan/USA, 2019)

Love is a business at Family Romance: a company that offers the substitute rental service. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps fulfill the dreams of his clients. Mahiro's mother will hire Ishii to impersonate her missing father. And reality will begin to blur.

Directed by German film-maker/actor Werner Herzog, Family Romance LLC captures a bizarre type of business which to my great surprise is actually available in Japan. Imagine having lost someone close to you, but for a reasonable price can replace that hole in in your life with a hired actor? The characters in the film are mostly played by non-professionals and the company's founder Yuichi Ishii lends his talent by playing himself. It works well, too, and I guess that's because he actually does this for a living on a daily basis. 

It's a strange and fascinating story of what means people will go to just to keep up appearances at a party or perhaps fool their parents with a dashing new husband. Herzog calls it one his "essential films" and I certainly can see how it addresses a relatively new phenomenon with respect, while also delivering a believable performance which aims to ask hard questions about what makes a family.

Genre: Drama

Killing (Japan, 2018)

Set during the tumultuous mid-19th century Edo period of Japan, Killing is the story of a masterless samurai or ronin named Ikematsu Sosuke. As the prevalent peace and tranquility are sure to be replaced by war and conflict across the land the swordsman feels restlessness creep upon him.

When you hear such promising words like "Shinya Tsukamoto's first samurai film", it's hard not to get a little misty-eyed. I've gushed enough over the director of Tetsuo: The Iron Man in the past so let's just say I was ecstatic when I heard he was working on a jidaigeki film. Apparently it was something he always had wanted to do so it could be seen as somewhat of a dream project of his. It's a fairly short affair, clocking in at barely 1 hour and 20 minutes, but Tsukamoto takes his time portraying every aspect of his samurai story with two warrior's clashing morals, the unstoppable need for revenge and sacrificing one's personal code of justice in the name of someone else's bloodlust. 

Tsukamoto has spoken about how he wanted the small cuts from the sword to feel very real and not just be beautiful slashes like you would see in the classics, and early on I personally thought he achieved that when a characters hand gets cut open and it looks realistic and painful as hell. Killing (a.k.a. Zan) proves to be an interesting, slightly gory new way for Tsukamoto to express his wonderfully insane self.

Genre: Action/Drama

House of Hummingbird (South Korea, 2019)

Set in 1994 in Seoul, a touching coming-of-age drama centered around the quiet, unexceptional eighth-grader Eun-Hee. Struggling to make passing grades and subject to non-stop screaming at home, she spends her time finding meaning in the love and friendships of her peers, in shoplifting, and in karaoke bars. It's in her cram school professor Yong-Ji, however, that Eun-Hee finds the answers that she seeks, as the two form an unlikely friendship.

Female director Bora Kim drew a lot of inspiration from her own childhood when writing the coming of age drama House of Hummingbird, and she wanted to highlight the all too rapid modernization of South Korea through the eyes of a young woman going through her own early stages of womanhood. The cinematography was carefully designed to evoke the correct time period and when talking about camera techniques in an interview, Kim gave the following statement: "In terms of camera movement and shot size, we followed her face and emotions and her body movement. Eun-hee’s way of seeing life was our intention and we tried our best to be very honest about camera movement and camera language throughout the film because this film is a realistic film, and we didn’t just want to zoom in and move in the camera to make it fancy". 

A lot of film makers definitely has a very pretentious way of shooting their films so it's great knowing Kim didn't want to overthink it but instead rely on the characters to express themselves. House of Hummingbird won a slew of awards at film festivals around the world and hopefully paved the way for not only Bora Kim but other female directors as well in a male-dominated industry.  

Genre: Drama

37 Seconds (Japan, 2019)

In 37 Seconds, 23-year-old comic book artist Yuma, physically disabled due to profound cerebral palsy and emotionally stunted by her well-meaning but overly protective mother, forges her own unusual path to sexual awakening and independence while at the same time discovering love and forgiveness.

37 Seconds is a film that really makes you feel for the main character and begs that everything goes her way, of course that can't always be the case but the struggles she goes through will also resonate with the viewer. The lead actress, Mei Kayama, was fantastic and the fact that she didn't fake her condition was a pivotal factor, I think. It's a film that easily could've been ruined by sappy melodrama and overacting by an actress trying to fake the disabled state of the character, instead we're given a film which much more easily connects with the viewer and can focus on telling a story to the fullest. 

Genre: Drama, 1h 55min

Parasite (South Korea, 2019)

All unemployed, Kim Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.

It really starts to feel like a big event everytime director Joon-ho Bong releases a new film, and this time it's his first movie made in his native country since Mother (2009), after having being active in the west with films such as Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Parasite is a naked look at social class, poverty and the means which we will go to to escape it, even if it means letting go of our own morality. Joon-ho portrays a scenario where a poor family get a taste of the finer things in life, but also one where you know that it'll spell disaster for everyone involved. 

As always, Joon-ho spoils us with well-crafted shots and gorgeous scenery, and constantly his direction feels so immensely thought-out where nothing is just being filmed, it's being filtered through his eyes and angled to evoke something in all of us. Parasite, which was the first Korean film to ever win the Palme d'Or, is a rush of black comedy and a look at what happens when the most fortunate meets the most desperate, no one saner than the other.

Genre: Comedy/Drama/Thriller