Author: Deirdre Crimmins

Early on in Yakuza Princess, it becomes clear that crafting a story around generations of warring crime bosses, an amnesiac hitman, and a mourning granddaughter is a little too much for co-writer/director Vicente Amorim to juggle. There’s plenty of good here in the new film, but not enough awareness of what that good stuff is. 

Based on the graphic novel Samurai Shiro by Brazilian author Danilo Beyruth, Yakuza Princess takes place mainly in São Paulo. The city has the largest Japanese diaspora in the world, and the setting serves the story well. The plot bobs and weaves its way through decades of yakuza factions in both Japan and Brazil, and focuses on its main character Akemi (Masumi). 

Akemi’s grandfather, whom she’s lived with in São Paulo for nearly her entire life, has recently passed away. She clings to his memory and his personal effects, and seems unprepared and uninterested in moving forward without him. She continues to work, and train as a fighter with her sensei, but she’s just going through the motions. Grief hits her especially hard on her 21st birthday, when, instead of celebrating, she gets into a violent bar fight and flees. 

As Akemi begins her emotional journey, a stranger (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) wakes up in a hospital in handcuffs with no memory—and a katana sword nearby. The bedside police chatter makes it clear that nobody knows who he is or why he has so many wounds on his face. He escapes from the hospital in hopes of figuring out his identity, where he got the sword, and why people want to kill him. He encounters Akemi, and they form a tentative partnership in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mysterious connection between them. 

This is the setup for Yakuza Princess—and also where it goes off the mark. As the film gets into heftier plot points, its weaknesses become more glaring. Masumi executes the fight choreography beautifully, and does an excellent job portraying the stony, aloof Akemi, but problems arise when Akemi becomes emotionally vulnerable. Masumi’s wooden expressions and flat delivery don’t reflect her softening character.

The movie also buckles under the weight of its plot. The number of flashbacks and reminders of who is talking about whom, or which character died when, should have been a sign to the director and editor that there is just too much story here. We only ever get short character insights and histories because Yakuza Princess needs to keep its breakneck pace to squeeze in way too many players.

In trying to be too many things, Yakuza Princess never fully develops the emotional world of its characters, yet it expects the audience to care about their family history. The film excels in the realism of its on-screen fights (gore hounds will delight in the visceral volume of blood throughout the movie), but it doesn’t lean in to being a martial arts film. It reveals the fantastical world of São Paulo’s Japanese section, but never immerses the audience in it. Sometimes movies suffer from a dearth of good ideas, but Yakuza Princess has the opposite problem: In trying to convey so many strengths, they are turned into weaknesses.

Swan Song

R, 105 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema

Debating answers to thought experiments is only frustrating when you need an answer: If a tree falls in the forest, do you feel stonewalled discussing the answer? Todd Stephens’ Swan Song is based on a similar riddle. Stephens wants us to enjoy the journey, allowing only one question: Is a story any less beautiful if it is not true? 

We first meet retired hairstylist Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier) in an assisted living home in Sandusky, Ohio, where he is far from thriving. The walls are gray, his clothes are gray, his hair is gray. And then Mr. Shamrock (Tom Bloom) arrives one day as the bearer of mixed news. Pat’s former client Rita (Linda Evans) has passed away, and her will includes a request for Pat to do her hair one last time. Pat’s reaction reveals his complicated past with Rita and some unhealed wounds that remain. 

Despite his initial hesitation, Pat decides to fulfill Rita’s last wish, and takes off by foot into town the next day. He cashes a check, loads up on cigarettes, and sets off on an emotional journey. The closer Pat gets to his destination, the closer he gets to his former self. He receives a hat from some friendly ladies at a Black hair salon that now occupies his former storefront, then an outfit worthy of his massive personality—little by little, he sheds the gray and regains his color. 

Each step of Pat’s self-rediscovery asks the audience to suspend its disbelief and buy into a beautiful lie. Nothing happens that’s too far outside the realm of possibility, but Pat gets quite lucky along the way. He has just enough money, meets kind strangers, his body cooperates when he needs it to, and people from his past reappear when he is ready to face them. The tidiness of the plot might be considered lazy writing without the affection for the film’s characters and a palatable wish to see Pat succeed. Abandoning reality allows writer/director Stephens to have fun without letting plausibility get in the way of the story. 

Most of Swan Song’s success comes from Kier’s pitch-perfect performance. Pat is an emotionally complicated character with a simple mission. His confidence and camp are charming and earned, but his underlying grief is never lost, even in his most celebratory moments. 

Pat’s infectious lust for experiences and indulgence is mirrored in Swan Song’s levity and dazzle. When Pat looks at the cheap costume jewelry adorning his fingers, we see the pride he feels—he loves it, and we love that about him.  

Not to be ignored is Swan Song’s subtext regarding the changing gay experience in America. Pat embodies the forgotten forefathers of gay history, who laid the groundwork for the family with two dads he sees on the beach, and the patrons of a gay bar where Pat grabs one last drink. 

The bar erupts into a dance party, serving as the film’s emotional crescendo, and it is both a cathartic release and an arrival at a mutual understanding. Pat’s flamboyance might feel dated, like a caricature of a bygone era of homosexuality, but he is doing what he loves. 

Swan Song peeks behind the fantasy curtain from time to time, but it is mostly unconcerned about what is real and what is imagined. In the end, none of that matters. The film confirms that the beauty of reaffirming one’s self without apology is a worthy pursuit, embellished or not.

Pig

R, 92 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema

Sometimes the beauty of a film lies in its simplicity. When character development and atmosphere are allowed to be front and center, the strength of cinema as an art comes into focus. With a few missteps, Pig is a beautiful example of earnest filmmaking.

In short, the film, written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, is about a man looking for his pig. But it’s no ordinary pig that Rob (Nicolas Cage) is searching for. This is a truffle-hunting pig named Apple, who earns Rob his income and sustains him as a gruff loner in the wilderness outside Portland, Oregon. 

Rob has occasional visits from truffle buyer and bourgeois annoyance Amir (Alex Wolff), and their relationship is symbiotic but tense. And when a pair of meth addicts steal Apple during a violent late-night ambush, Rob turns to Amir for both a ride to the city, which Rob left 15 years ago, and help finding his beloved pig.

As the film follows Rob and Amir on their amateur sleuthing expedition, a depth and tenderness develops between the pair. Amir’s grating exterior begins to crumble, and while he never entirely pours his soul out to the bearded forager, he becomes more honest with himself.

Rob, on the other hand, does not change. He doesn’t need to. This is not a story about Rob discovering himself, like it is for Amir. We learn how Rob, once a legendary chef, became a mushroom-hunting hermit, and what he left behind, but Pig goes off track when we see Rob doing things that do not fall in line with his character or with the world he currently lives in. In one scene, the movie dips into a hyper-violent urban underbelly that feels dishonest for the characters, and it’s hard to swallow. 

Pig also has an uneven assessment of fine-dining and chefs’ egos. The culinary focus is no surprise, given that a truffle pig and the truffle trade are at the core of the story, but it does seem to be of two minds when it comes to the state of the celebrity chef.

In one scene, Rob literally sticks his thumb into an over-the-top fancy meal and takes the chef to task for being full of himself. Not much later, the camera lingers over every drip of sauce and potato slice of a meal prepared with a similar degree of pretension. The setting has changed and the circumstances are different, but one meal is offensive and the other delectable—and we are never told the difference.

Cage deserves praise for his understated performance, but Wolff is the one who does the emotional heavy lifting. While the plot is focused on Rob’s mission to find his pig, every moving shift lies with Amir, who goes from sleazy to sympathetic. All in all, Pig is a strange, heartbreaking, sometimes funny art-house winner that moves us with its message of love and loss.

Combining a classic whodunit with werewolves may seem like an awkward fit. But in Werewolves Within, the two elements complement each other, resulting in a hilarious, bloody blend that avoids feeling bloated or tonally confused.

The second feature from actor-turned-director Josh Ruben, Werewolves Within comes hot on the heels of his directorial debut Scare Me, a single-location film with so few actors you can count them on one hand. While Scare Me gave Ruben a chance to show the world how much he could do with so little, Werewolves Within is a scaled-up foray into more ambitious filmmaking—it includes a whole town to explore and a gaggle of townsfolk in an ensemble cast. 

Not only is the film a step forward for its director, Werewolves Within is also the second feature from fledgling film studio Ubisoft, best known as a video-game production house.

Not surprisingly, the roots of this lycanthropic murder mystery lie in a similarly themed video game of the same title where players try to figure out who the werewolf is. 

Werewolves Within starts with a hint of sinister goings-on in the town of Beaverfield, and the story is anchored by the likable park ranger Finn (Sam Richardson). Finn is new to town, and within a few moments of arriving, local postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) gives him the lay of the land and spills the tea on everyone. Like most small towns, Beaverfield’s residents have plenty of history with each other—but they’re also faced with a modern crisis, grappling with whether or not to allow the construction of a gas pipeline. The tensions are not simmering; they are aggressively boiling at the surface, and the neighbors are not subtle about them.

Soon after Finn’s arrival, a massive snowstorm hits, and everyone is forced to head to the big inn on the hill to stay safe and warm. It is there that the film morphs into the murder mystery we have been waiting for. Though it doesn’t quite match Clue or Knives Out, Werewolves Within manages to maintain its own roster of amplified personalities and motives. As bodies drop and accusations fly, the night gets more deadly.

The tension would be riveting on its own, thanks to performances from the brilliant ensemble cast, but clues start to suggest there’s something supernatural afoot. The innkeeper’s missing husband, the little bichon frise who is killed violently, and the massive claw marks around town all point to the possibility that there is a werewolf on the loose in Beaverfield.

The classic horror monster is played for laughs, but the mounting evidence points to things becoming even more dangerous. Even with this pressing threat, the townsfolk refuse to put down their guns and solve their differences like friends. 

Werewolves Within manages to avoid common genre pitfalls by being either scary or funny in each moment, and there is a genuine mystery to figure out: Who or what is doing all the killing? This balance is tricky, but Ruben manages to pull it off with the confidence of a seasoned filmmaker. It’s not easy to get an audience to laugh at death while dreading the next murder.