a review of X圣治

HOOPTOBER NINE! NIGHT TWENTY-THREE! + 2022 Criterion Challenge Week 42/Category 15: Director I haven't seen before What an introduction to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who I've clearly been sleeping on for the last quarter-century. There's something very assured about how he writes and directs his characters; He basically shows us everything we need to know about who they are and where this is all going in the early minutes of the film, and we spend the next 90 minutes basically parsing and unpuzzling what we've already seen. This is also a reminder that I need to see more things with Kōji Yakusho, who's as compelling as any noir gumshoe I've ever seen in a film, but with an emotional and psychological depth that blows most of those away.