Our Little Sister (PG)
Curzon Artificial Eye, £15.99
A prolific director, Hirokazu Koreeda already has 16 features to his name and his last three have all featured in competition at the Cannes film festival. Our Little Sister, from 2013, is one of them. It tells the story of three 20something sisters living together in the Japanese seaside city of Kamakura, and the half-sister they adopt when their father, who left when the girls were young and is now on his third wife, dies after a long illness.
The newcomer is football-daft 15-year-old Suzu (Suzu Hirose). The sisters are sensible eldest girl Sachi (Haruka Ayase), middle girl Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), and kooky youngest sister Chika (Kaho, a mononymous actress and model of some renown in Japan). Sachi works in a hospital and is having an affair with a married doctor who won't leave his wife, Yoshino likes a beer and is prone to inappropriate boyfriends, and Chika works in a sports shop and hangs out with an afro-haired ex-mountain climber with only six toes.
The film is visually stunning and the sisters' close domesticity is well observed (Koreeda has drawn comparisons with the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu). But the one note cuteness becomes a little wearing: the only moment of conflict is when the sisters' estranged mother unexpectedly turns up for a family memorial service and announces she wants to sell the girls' marvellous old house, which had belonged to their grandmother. But even here, the friction soon abates and mum is sent off with a smile and a bottle of granny's prized plum wine. Perhaps the source material bears some of the blame: Our Little Sister is adapted from Unimachi Diary, a manga comic of the josei genre which is aimed at teenage girls and young women.
Heart Of A Dog (E)
Dogwoof, £9.99
New York-based artist and musician Laurie Anderson muses on love, loss, memory and, er, surveillance culture in this film inspired in part by the life of her dog Lolabelle, in part by her Buddhist faith, and in part by the works of novelist David Foster Wallace and philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Written down, that makes it look like so much pretentious piffle. But Anderson is a rigorous and disciplined artist and her steady hand on the tiller makes Heart Of A Dog a mesmerising watch. The 75 minute running time helps, too.
There are sequences animated by Anderson herself, photographs of Lolabelle (we see footage of her playing the keyboard, her party trick) and recreations of walks she and Anderson made through New York, or in the coastal areas of northern California where Anderson took herself in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. But there's a strong autobiographical strand to the film too, as Anderson talks in measured words and a hypnotic voice about her life in New York and her childhood in Illinois, with some scenes dramatised by a cast of actors including her late partner, musician Lou Reed, and a man she describes as “our neighbour, Julian the painter”. This is Julian Schnabel.
Deeply personal film essays are easy to conceive and initiate, but notoriously hard to pull off. This is an example of a good one. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences certainly thought so: they shortlisted Anderson for the 2015 Oscars in the Best Documentary section, reasoning (presumably) that her frankly uncategorisable film would feel more at home there than anywhere else.
Gilda (12)
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, £17.99
One of an eclectic bunch of films being released on Blu-ray under the title The Criterion Collection, Charles Vidor's 1946 film adds more than a flavour of Casablanca to a story about an American gambler running a Buenos Aires casino and also contains one of the all-time great femme fatale entrances - Rita Hayworth, asked if she's decent, throws her hair back at her dressing table and goes: “Me?”.
Hayworth is the titular dame, Glenn Ford is gambler Johnny Farrell, who washes up in Argentina and is employed by Gilda's swordstick-carrying husband Ballin Mundson (George Macready) to run his casino and to also run Gilda here and there as she desires. The trouble is Gilda and Johnny aren't unknown to each other, a fact Mundson uncovers pretty quickly when he sees the emotional intensity of their verbal jousting. Breaking into the uncomfortable ménage à trois are a couple of dodgy German businessman (this is Argentina in 1946, remember) and a local police chief who frequents the casino for reasons other than a love of roulette. But the film is best known for Hayworth's sexy dance sequence as, dressed in a low-cut black dress, she sings Put The Blame On Mame. Extras in this lush, 2K digital restoration include tributes from Baz Luhrmann and Martin Scorsese, and a documentary feature about the ever-watchable Hayworth.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here