There is an old Chinese proverb: “Three may keep a secret, so long as two are dead”, Paolo Sorrentino’s sophomore feature film, The Consequences of Love, presents its own spin on this truism: “When two people know a secret, it’s no longer a secret.” Total isolation of the truth is the only way to keep the truth concealed and this sense of isolation extends into various facets of Sorrentino’s film - characters, visuals and narrative.

Nobody Knows is the most widely seen of Hirokazu Koreeda’s films, a possible reason for this is its dramatic premise: Children in Jeopardy. This premise is almost always guaranteed to peak wider interest, David Simon credited the success of The Wire’s fourth season to this factor especially amongst American audiences.

Modern Japanese Cinema has been dominated by two names (animation not withstanding); Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike, but in recent years both have become decreasingly successful at wooing international audiences and arguably peaked in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Kitano hasn’t had a major release in the UK since Zatoichi (2003) and Miike, although remaining a very prolific filmmaker, hasn’t directed a film of significant note since Ichi the Killer (2001).

WARNING: Contains spoilers for both films throughout.

Sir Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, implying that every scientific success is based entirely on the success of those who have come before. This statement can, and regularly is, transposed into other areas of human endeavor such as philosophy or art.

French director Erick Zonca wanted to make a film which would begin as a portrait of a woman then slowly change gears and become a thriller about kidnapping and violence. Zonca has completely succeeded as his 2008 film Julia is a particularly impressive character piece which organically develops into something rather more generic in its second half.