Live-action remake 5 Centimeters Per Second a snooze, Ari Aster’s Eddington full of idiosyncrasy

5 Centimeters Per Second (PG)

114 minutes, opens on Feb 5
★★☆☆☆

The story: Two elementary-school kids bond over their passion for reading. Akari moves away with her family after graduation, but they promise to spend the end of the world together, and for the next 18 years, Takaki drifts aimlessly in search of a connection forever lost.

The title describes the speed at which a cherry blossom falls.

Time is the motif of the Japanese coming-of-age romance 5 Centimeters Per Second.

It is also the fatal flaw of director Yoshiyuki Okayama’s laggardly two-hour live-action expansion of the cherished 2007 Makoto Shinkai animation of the same name, which distilled the ache of unformed dreams in just 63 precise minutes.

Takaki (Hokuto Matsumura) clings to memories of his first love Akari (Mitsuki Takahata), closing himself off to the possibility of a relationship with his heartsick high-school classmate Kanae (Nana Mori).

His journey of learning to let go is a story in three acts: his childhood in 1991, his adolescence and, eventually, his late 20s.

This retelling reverses the structure for no logical reason by beginning with Takaki as a moony loner, working as a programmer in present-day 2008 Tokyo.

He is played by J-pop idol Matsumura, gazing sadly into the distance at passing clouds, nocturnal skies and sakura falling at 5cm a second.

Okayama has a strong visual eye. He is a photographer, whose only other feature is At The Bench (2024).

But his filmed tableaux, lacking animation’s allusive powers, are incapable of expressing the character’s inner thoughts. They are mere picturesque images, their effect banal and schmaltzy.

Hot take: A dreamy anime, very much a tone poem, has been remade into a snooze.

Eddington (R21)

162 minutes, available on HBO Max from Feb 13
★★★☆☆

The story: In May 2020, in the days of the Covid-19 pandemic, gormless Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) of fictional Eddington, New Mexico, is so annoyed by the containment measures, he runs for mayor against slick incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). “Your Being Manipulated” is his campaign slogan. Their contested election fractures the sleepy desert town.

The American neo-western satire Eddington is another articulation of anxiety by Ari Aster. It is a horror of a sort, more real than the American writer-director’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).

Joe’s feud is partly personal. Ted once dated his wife (Emma Stone), who is mentally unstable and makes creepy dolls. His mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), locked down with them, is a conspiracist.

There are Black Lives Matter social justice rallies, online disinformation and Austin Butler as a cult guru.

Then a double homicide happens, followed by farcical antics.

Viewers may reasonably ask: So, what is your point?

The black comedy has been met with puzzlement since its 2025 Cannes Film Festival debut. It is a wayward sprawl with scattershot humour and meandering stretches of torpor.

But Phoenix – rejoining Aster after Beau Is Afraid (2023) – is predictably good as the absurd anti-hero losing his grip in a community that reflects larger society’s ideological and cultural fault lines. All are hypocrites, whether the virtue-signalling teen liberals or the conservatives, and everyone is living in different realities.

Aster crystallises an inflection moment in contemporary America when its fraying social fabric is irreparably rended. And if the story has no resolution nor, indeed, any definite point, that is because there is no foreseeable end to the polarisation, no making sense of the chaos.

Hot take: This idiosyncratic pandemic caper is about much more than mask mandates.