Director: Yuya Ishii
Language: Japanese (subtitled in English)
Yuya Ishii's follow-up to his much-lauded 2013 drama "Fune wo Amu (The Great Passage)" is in the same serious humanistic vein — and again contrasts with the 31-year-old director's raucous, blackly comic earlier work. The story depicts the threatened dissolution of a middle-class family after the mother (Mieko Harada) is diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor. There's little medical melodrama though, and the conclusion feels too convenient.
