Four out of today’s five flicks are foreign, but that’s just the alphabet — not many American movies fall between Ks and Kw.

Reading so many subtitles has made me restless, eager to see some good old American schlock, where the conversations are in English and inane, often interrupted by gunfire or explosions or dames in bikinis. None of that today, though…

Kseniya Simonova (2011)
a/k/a Chinese Tale

Nine minutes of art in action, as Kseniya Simonova drags her fingers across a canvas covered with sand and lit from underneath, making illusions as beautiful as anything on your walls. She builds castles in the sand, warriors and princesses, windows and pandas and swirls and storms. Suitable for framing, before it blows away.

Turn the volume low, or the piercing piccolo music will stab a hole straight from your eyes to your ears.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998)

After giving birth, a young mother dies from severe internal bleeding. “We tried our best,” says a doctor, but they don’t actually try to save her, because she’s fine. She’s radiant, awake, holding her baby, having a long conversation with her husband in a modern hospital room, where an IV stands behind her, but isn’t attached. As no doctors, nurses, or interns provide any medical services, this allegedly dying woman is comfortable, coiffed, and has time to write eight handwritten letters to her newborn daughter, one to be read at each of her next eight birthdays.

That’s the film’s first few minutes, and then the woman is dead. Flash forward eight years, and her widowed husband is raising their daughter, who’s a spoiled-rotten YouTube star looking forward to her eighth and final letter from her dead mother, to be opened and read tomorrow.

The story is mostly about the widow finding new love, but every moment is dumb. Other than the subtitles and songs and South Asian setting, this could be a Hallmark movie. According to Wikipedia, it won the 1998 Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment, and it’s certainly wholesome, but where’s the entertainment?

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kukuschka (2016)

A wordless and dark nine-minute computer-animated short from Russia. The main character looks like the baby from Eraserhead, all grown up and shepherding a bunch of baby Eraserheads on a follow-the-sun journey across some desert.

The music is a heavy dirge that starts and stops, and when it stops the film is nearly weird enough to be interesting, but then comes the dirge again.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Kwaidan (1964)
a/k/a Ghost Stories

Four Japanese horror stories, told theatrically but with epic widescreen and visuals.

1. “The Black Hair” – This gave me goose bumps. A man leaves his wife to become a samurai, but never forgets her, and eventually returns…

2. “The Woman of the Snow” – A wandering woodsman is caught in a snowstorm, personified as a woman. The music is built around a jarring, discordant note played repeatedly on (I think) a violin, which made my teeth hurt and head ache.

3. “Noichi the Earless” – A blind guy is summoned by an armored ghost and ordered to sing or moan bloody war stories from Japan’s ancient past. The ghost is frickin’ scary, so to protect him, priests paint pretnear every inch of his flesh with holy scriptures, which is also frickin’ scary, and is supposed to repel the ghost like a cross repels vampires. At least, I think that’s what’s going on, but it’s bizarre and Japanese enough that I became confused. Which doesn’t matter, because even without understanding it, this is so damned creepy it works as horror. It’s a bloody nightmare, really.

4. “In a Cup of Tea” – An old man, having tea alone, somehow sees the reflection of a younger man in his teacup. He tosses the tea, pours a fresh cup, but the reflection is there again. Finally, the old man drinks the tea, which of course summons the man in the reflection, but is he really there?

The first and third mini-movies are best, but the fourth is the one that freaked me most at its ending. The second, my least favorite, was perhaps wisely removed when Kwaidan was first released in America. All quarters are lusciously filmed and acted, under the direction of Masaki Kobayashi (Harikari, The Human Condition trilogy).

In addition to its sometimes bewildering and surreal mood, the movie’s backstory makes it maybe even cooler. All four segments are based on stories written by Patrick Hearn, a 19th-century Irish/Greek-American who migrated to Japan, immersed himself in its culture, learned the language, and eventually wrote very successfully under the pen name Koizumi Yakumo.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ladybug Ladybug (1963)

On an ordinary day at an ordinary grade school in 1963, the air raid alarm goes off. It’s a “class Y” alert, which means a nuclear attack is imminent, but it’s just a malfunction, right? … Right?

All through the film, it’s uncertain whether bombs will be falling, and the uncertainty might be more frightful than knowing.

William Daniels, Nancy Marchand, and Estelle Parsons star, all younger than you’ve ever seen them. Playing the school secretary, Kathryn Hays is the spitting image of Diana Rigg, and you can’t spit much better than that.

Mostly, though, it’s the children who carry the film. And they’re kids, not ‘movie kids’, which makes everything more vital and real than if they’d been, you know, Tony Dow, Patty Duke, Kurt Russell, etc. When the arguing and panicking starts, and it’s coming from children instead of adults, it’s just — wow.

Screenplay by Eleanor Perry, and directed by her husband, Frank Perry. Their other projects include Diary of a Mad Housewife, Last Summer, and The Swimmer, but I’m declaring this their co-masterpiece.

It’s the pessimist in me (which is all of me, really), but I’m a fan of armageddon-is-looming-or-actually-here flicks. Some of the genre greats include The Day After, Miracle Mile, On the Beach, Testament, Threads, The War Game … and by golly yes, Ladybug Ladybug.

What the title means, I dunno. No bugs, lady or otherwise, were spotted during the flick.

Verdict: BIG YES.

10/23/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
— — —
If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note. And I mean it — if you ask, I will get you the movie.
— — —
No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.