Death—somebody’s death, at least—has a way of reminding the drug smugglers in Takashi Miike‘s First Love (2019) that they’re wicked. But, here, death usually happens too fast for the characters to be reminded of anything. Kill-or-be-killed proceeds apace. It’s better just not to be wicked.

A young boxer (Masataka Kubota) helps a drug-addicted girl forced into prostitution (Sakurato Konishi) escape her captor, this being the fulcrum for the chaotic arena of the movie’s murderers. Scripted by Masa Nakamura, the film is an ultra-violent actioner set in Tokyo. Its villains have startling vitality, and are often interesting and troubling. This describes vicious Kase and frantic Julie, whose portrayers are excellent. (Kubota and Konishi are good too.)

I love the powderkeg nature of First Love, and I don’t think Konishi’s call girl is un-addicted to drugs yet at the film’s end. The pic is a little too honest for that.

(In Japanese with English subtitles)

The abandoned woman in the Catherine Lacey short story, “Because You Have To” (from Certain American States, 2018), does not quite do things, or refuse to do things, Because You Have To. She has been a criminal and still can be. Currently, though, she lives in a milieu from which she is emotionally disconnected. “I don’t know what to do now,” she observes, “a state I am so familiar with it feels like my only true home.”

But for the woman, her milieu is merely perplexing, as is her behavior. For her landlady, “broke and jobless,” it is agonizing. Presumably both must stay there . . . Because You Have To.

Lacey has written a not wholly atypical but still canny and sobering story. Hardly humorless too.

The protagonist in the film Corpus Christi (2019), Daniel, released from a reformatory, is a serious sinner who would like to become a Catholic priest, and to find redemption, but must naughtily settle for operating as a fake priest instead. Curiously, he becomes a better man. In the parish there are unforgiving people and Daniel declares that forgiveness is necessary since to forgive is to love. Just so!

Still, this fake priest is a fake “priest of God.” He is hurt by the world and by himself. In fact there is a particular level on which the one thing missing from Daniel’s evolving spiritual life is suffering, but it doesn’t stay missing. This is just one level, though.

Corpus Christi is a powerful movie (directed by Jan Komasa) with an incisive screenplay (by Mateusz Pacewicz). Bartosz Bielenia is compelling as Daniel, and such actors as Aleksandra Konieczna (Lidia) and Leszek Lichota (the mayor) are superb in their depth. This Polish work may be a masterpiece.

(In Polish with English subtitles)