Fallen Leaves
There’s something poetic about a filmmaker inclined towards repetition making the fourth part of a trilogy, and the ratio of familiarity to content in FALLEN LEAVES is pretty much 1:1 - <PERSON>’s patented dry cocktail of anxiety, enervation and empathy goes down easy, albeit with a bit less bitterness in his old(ish) age. Never one to try to change the world, <PERSON> instead remakes the same small corner of it in his image, and if there’s a certain timidity in that project, it’s commensurate with a winning lack of pretension; he's not oblique, or enigmatic, or even confrontational, and nor is he trying to subvert anything. Instead, he puts people, things, and songs he likes onscreen in a space that flatters (though doesn’t flatten) them; his only message, insofar as he maybe has one, has to do with kindness (of the small, plausible variety). Anyway, take his honest recidivism over, say, <PERSON>, and note that the best thing that can be said for some kinds of cinema is that it doesn’t need much said about it at all. 306