Today is a day of fave directors delivering the goods, plus a new star rises in a film by a first time director.World of Kanako [Japan, Tetsuya Nakashima, 4.5] Deranged, brutal ex-cop (Koji Yakusho) searches for his missing daughter. Assaultive, megaviolent neo-noir furiously upends the genre's moral expectations.
Ned Rifle [US, Hal Hartley, 4] On his 18th birthday a young man, aided by a fetching literary stalker (Aubrey Plaza), sets out to find and kill his father, who got his mother imprisoned for life on terrorism charges. Completes the decade-spanning trilogy that started with Henry Fool and Fay Grim with Hartley's trademark witty dialogue and underplayed delivery.
Where the first one was novelistic in scope, the second paced like a screwball comedy, this one is spare and stripped down.
If you have a screen crush on Aubrey Plaza this film will do nothing to disabuse of it.
Tokyo Fiancee [Belgium, Stefan Liberski, 4] Young Belgian woman who wants to be Japanese moves to Tokyo and falls in love with a guy she's tutoring in French. Sweet, melancholy romance powered by the incredible charm of soulful, adorable lead actress Pauline Etienne.
Fires on the Plain [Japan, Shinya Tsukamoto, 5] in the dying days of WWII, Japanese soldiers stuck on the island of Leyte go to desperate lengths to survive. Tsukamoto turns his career-long obsession with mental disintegration and brutal body transformation away from genre freak-out to the ultimate real world horror.
The source novel was also adapted in 1959 by master director Kon Ichikawa. It is a masterpiece of the classic Japanese studio era, just as this version is a masterwork of the Japanese extreme cinema tradition.
In the 
As sure as summer turns ineluctably to fall, the packed-to-the-rafters multi-track madness of 
Once again that mammoth wave of sensory overload we call Gen Con,wherein we all magically remember again that gaming is fun and community brings joy, approaches at its typical barreling speed.
