Though not a household name stateside (until perhaps recently), the great Kōji Yakusho has been one of Japan’s most revered and versatile actors. To celebrate a newly restored director’s cut of Yakusho’s 1996 breakout “Shall We Dance?,” The Brattle Theatre has programmed a quick retrospective of the actor’s greatest hits, titled simply “Kōji Yakusho x4.” The centerpiece of the program is, of course, “Shall We Dance?,” an international sensation that sparked a ballroom dance craze in its native Japan and received an American remake in 2004 (starring Richard Gere in the Yakusho role); it screens Friday through Monday in a new 4K restoration with 17 minutes of newly restored footage. But Yakusho is far from a mere rom-com leading man, as evidenced by the rest of the films in the series. His first major role came in Juzo Itami’s wonderfully eccentric “ramen western” “Tampopo” (1985, screening Saturday), as a nattily dressed gangster with strange proclivities for the consumption of eggs. Yakusho’s charisma is used to opposite effect in J-horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure” (1997, screening Friday and Sunday), a harrowing, Fincheresque thriller in which Yakusho plays a world-weary detective on the hunt for a possibly supernatural serial killer. Contemporary audiences might know Yakusho best for his revelatory performance as the world’s most contented lavatory cleaner in Win Wenders’ Academy Award-nominated “Perfect Days” (2023, screening Saturday and Sunday) –a performance that, in this writer’s opinion, ranks among the very best of the 21st century. The four films in the series could scarcely be more different, a testament to Yakusho’s consummate mastery of his art form.
It is nearly impossible to separate Francis Ford Coppola’s mind-bending Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now” (1979) from the legend surrounding its production. The ambitious shoot, which brought Coppola and his cast and crew deep into the jungles of Cambodia, went nearly a year over schedule (and double its budget) and was plagued by natural disaster, physical injury, fevered rewrites and madness; by all accounts, Coppola on set was himself not terribly far removed from Marlon Brando’s messianic Colonel Kurtz. Fortunately for us, Coppola’s wife, the late documentarian Eleanor Coppola, was also on set to record the making (and near-unmaking) of her husband’s masterpiece. The resulting work, “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” (1991) would itself come to be considered one of the greatest films ever made about filmmaking, as essential a document as “Apocalypse Now” itself. “Hearts of Darkness” screens in a new 4K restoration at the Somerville Theatre on Friday and Sunday, while “Apocalypse Now” screens Saturday in its original “roadshow cut,” complete with a replica of the premiere screening’s original souvenir booklet (included with admission). “Apocalypse Now” stands as one of the most revered American movies ever made – which, as “Hearts of Darkness” proves, is as surreal and unlikely as any of the events depicted therein.
On alternating Fridays this summer, The Brattle Theatre occupies the Kendall/MIT Open Space for a series of free outdoor screenings of animated animal classics. The series begins, naturally enough, with Gints Zilbalodis’ instant animated classic “Flow” (2024), screening Friday at sundown. “Flow” is one of those films that almost feels too marvelous to exist: A gentle, entirely wordless epic in which a courageous black cat and its animal friends navigate a flood in an ambiguously postapocalyptic world. The film itself is as much of an underdog as its protagonists. Handcrafted by Zilbalodis and a very small team of animators on consumer-grade software, “Flow” first took the festival circuit by storm before becoming a word-of-mouth sensation, and eventually became the rare independent feature to win Best Animated Film at the Oscars. It’s a film guaranteed to capture the imaginations of audiences young and old, and an inspired choice to watch underneath the stars.
In a world in which the daily news brings political stories nearly too absurd to be believed, humor and satire have never been more important to the survival of one’s sanity. To that end, The Brattle has declared a Summer of Satire, a weekly series of films gleefully lampooning the status quo. The series kicks off Wednesday with the poets laureate of silver screen satire: the Marx Brothers’ anarchic masterpiece “Duck Soup” (1933). Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, irascible potentate of the fictional nation of Fredonia, with Chico and Harpo as a pair of equally madcap double agents (Zeppo is in there too). “Duck Soup” is rightfully hailed as one of the greatest comedies ever made, filled with immortal gags (including Groucho and Harpo’s legendary mirror routine) and a furious pace rarely seen outside Warner Bros. cartoons. But it’s also one of Hollywood’s most purely antiwar films, in that it doesn’t grant a single moment of dignity to the soldiers in its central conflict. War may be hell, but, as the Marx Brothers demonstrate, it can also be incredibly silly – something we’ve unfortunately come to know all too well.
The transcontinental film collective Grrl Haus Cinema returns to its home at The Brattle on Wednesday with another showcase of short subjects by women, trans, nonbinary and genderqueer artists. This time around, the theme is a local showcase, with filmmakers hailing from points all across Massachusetts, including Somerville textile artist Charlie Dov Schön. As always, the films on display run the gamut from animation (Schön’s “Divorce Hamster”) to surreal science fiction (Bostonian Natasha Zinos’ “Durata”) to punk rock introspection (Jylah Bah’s “Frontwoman”) and everything in between. The screening includes a Q&A segment with several of the filmmakers in attendance, making this a fittingly intimate showcase for some one-of-a-kind work.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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