Yakusoku

Excellent acting, direction, casting and music. You discover, and with reading Japanese stories in Japanese, that you are finding little pieces of information that suddenly fall into place later on in the movie - it seems more "real", it's like living the story. The music is simple but effective. It is used to enhance the feeling of the scene. Saito Koishi is a brilliant director, and Kishi Keiko, a very quietly-beautiful woman, absolutely draws you to her to know her. If you like Japanese movies, watch this one.

The Rendezvous didn't quite resonate with me as much as I'd hoped, but it was still pretty decent overall. It's a quiet and very slow-paced romantic drama about two strangers on a train who seem to feel some kind of connection between each other, but circumstances eventually reveal that any sort of romance is unlikely to last long.

It sounds familiar for sure, and though the basics aren't anything new, I think there were a few points here and there that proved surprising. Maybe the film waited too long to reveal certain things for my liking, but it was absolutely the kind of character-focused drama that got more interesting as it reached its conclusion, even if parts of that conclusion seemed all but inevitable from the outset.