First Look: I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn and Morte Cucina

The following reviews appeared in somewhat different form as part of the IFFR coverage at InReview Online.

I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn (Ugana Ken'ichi, 2025) - April 29, 2026

“It's amazing to be able to create something that others don't understand at all." So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of Ugana Ken’ichi’s The Gesuidouz, one of the finest films from last year’s Japan Cuts festival. It could just as well be the theme for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn, one of a remarkable twelve films Ugana has released since 2022. The Gesuidouz is about a punk band making a hit song after weeks of struggle and labor and, more importantly, the struggle to make another great song after that initial success. I Fell in Love is more conventional in its structure, but no lesser for it. It tells exactly the story its title promises, like all z-grade films must.

Mihara Ui stars as a young and successful actress in the Japanese pop film industry who has become disillusioned with her work. This is revealed in a remarkable opening sequence where she is being interviewed during a press junket and cannot contain her boredom and her loathing disdain for the empty-headed reporter questioning her, repeatedly looking not at her interrogator, but rather directly into the camera as she gives her hostile and ambivalent answers. Ugana will end the film with another instance of Mihara looking directly at us, but by that time her entire world will have changed.

It happens after she and her boyfriend travel on vacation to New York. They break-up on the streets after her incessant complaining, and she loses her phone, her wallet, and her luggage. She ends up in a bar, getting hammered on shots from a sympathetic bartender (she doesn’t speak English, and no one she meets speaks Japanese) and falls in with a crowd of punk filmmakers led by Estevan Muñoz, a movie-mad puppy dog about to direct his first feature when his lead actress drops out the night before shooting starts. One thing leads to another and Mihara is the new leading lady, though none of the crew knows if she has any acting experience.

The rest of the film follows the shoot, as Mihara, and by extension the rest of us, are carried away by Muñoz’s love of film and filmmaking. In turn, the entire crew is blown away by Mihara’s acting skill and star power, her level of craft and professionalism that far exceeds anything they’re used to seeing. As it must in the movies, work turns into romance between our heroes, but really the movie is more about discovering the joy in one’s work, and realizing that only at the margins of success, where the work is done not for money or fame or power, can that joy truly be found. I Fell in Love is packed with references to and cameos from the world of no-budget filmmaking, names like Larry Fessenden and Lloyd Kauffman. And the pace and subject matter of Ugana’s career to date seems to be aspiring to their footsteps (the band’s first album in The Gesuidouz was titled “Toxic Avengers Infinity War”). Muñoz too appears to come from that world, and his earnest performance, like a Fred Armisen character played with a complete lack of irony, reflects the honest enthusiasm of the joy of making movies. Mihara’s work is more nuanced, selling both her character’s ennui and her gradual realization that work doesn’t have to be work, it can, if you want, be play as well.

Morte Cucina (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 2025) - April 29, 2026

There was a time not so very long ago where, hard as it is to believe these days, East Asian cinema was commonplace among the hipper video stores and movie theatres of America. Hong Kong action films, Japanese horror pictures, Korean action and horror movies, and more were the cutting edge among genre film fans, Jet Li and Jackie Chan headlined Hollywood movies, and art house audiences thrilled to the colorful spectacles of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, the austere minimalism of Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, and the genre experiments of Miike Takashi and Kitano Takeshi. At the heart of that boom was a new flowering of Thai cinema, led in the art houses by Apichatpiong Weerasethakul, whose 2010 Palme d-Or win marked both the culmination and end of the major distributors interest in East Asian cinema, and in the grindhouses by the elbows and knees of the remarkable Muay Thai star Tony Jaa. Right alongside them though were filmmakers like Wisit Sasanatieng, whose remarkable ode to classic Thai melodrama Tears of the Black Tiger was distributed (and butchered) by Miramax (like most every other East Asian film the Weinsteins got their sleezy paws on), and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, whose 6ixtynin9 was a stylish exercise for the genre crowd and whose Last Life in the Universe, an off-beat minimalist romance starring Asano Tadanobu as a yakuza-turned-librarian, was one of the very best of the era’s popular art house fare.

While Weerasethakul remains a major figure in world cinema, though he’s only directed one feature in the last decade, Sasanatieng and Ratanaruang have seemingly fallen off the radar for all but the most dedicated non-Thai followers of Thai cinema, though they’ve continued to work steadily. Their films show up at a festival here or there, or on a streaming platform among the churning slop, but rarely to the kind of fame and acclaim their earlier films enjoyed. I don’t know that I’ve heard anyone talk about a Ratanaruang film in the fifteen years since 2011’s lackluster thriller Headshot. But here he is at First Look, with his latest feature Morte Cucina.

It’s a slow-motion rape-revenge film where a waitress at a nice restaurant (Sao, played by Bella Boonsang) recognizes a customer as the man who assaulted her some years before. Her revenge scheme plays out over several years: she seduces him away from his wife (an annoying dealer hyping the works of a silly artist played in a cameo by Asano), learns to cook, and does so in such a way that he cannot stop eating her food even though it is literally sucking the life out of him. One of his buddies suspects what she’s up to, and any tension in the film, aside from our trying to figure out exactly what she’s doing and how, comes from wondering whether or not he’s going to figure it out and put a stop to it before she gets away with it.

But as is befitting a film more concerned with mystery and allegory than clarity of plot and motivation (there are more scenes of corpse-fucking in the film than straight-forward exposition), the atmosphere and mood is sublime. Christopher Doyle, who also shot Last Life in the Universe, is the cinematographer, and his images of the lush landscapes and dilapidated homes of the Thai countryside are as luscious as his images of Thai cuisine. The early part of the film is confused a bit by a flashback structure that’s reasonably straight-forward aside from the fact that the actress playing the young Sao looks nothing like the older version of the character. These scenes are desaturated, and hinge on the character coming from a particularly misogynist Muslim community, which seems a bit prejudicial, if not outright insulting. But the rest of the film is awash in Doyle’s characteristic colors, matched every step by an enveloping soundscape of natural sounds (trees and water and insects) and the sizzles and boils of a first-rate kitchen. Compare it to an American cooking-revenge movie like The Menu, with its thudding literalism and TV aesthetics, and see what we lost in terms of craft and vision when we let Thai cinema disappear from our mainstream screens.