Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Last Life in the Universe (2003)
Director: Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Weltschmerz never seemed more dynamic than it does in Pen-ek's sly and seductive movie about an ex-yakuza working as a librarian in the Japanese Cultural Centre in Bangkok. Obsessive, fastidiously ordered and allergic to fish, Kenji (Asano) constantly rehearses his own suicide - he identifies with the lizard in a children's story which finds itself the last lizard on earth - until the day he witnesses a girl killed in a traffic accident during a row with her sister Noi (Sinitta). Next day he has urgent reasons to get out of town (there are two bodies in his apartment: his brother and the hitman sent to get him) and he hitches a ride with the grief-stricken Noi to her tumbledown house near Pattaya. In the few days before her departure to work as a bar girl in Osaka, he cleans up her place, inherits her car and reaches out to her to form an unexpected human bond. Hardly anything happens, but the film grips like a thriller; tone and pace, atmosphere and imagery tell voluminous stories of their own. It has Doyle's best camerawork since Happy Together and a snazzy cameo from Miike in shades and a snakeskin suit.Author: TR
Cast & crew
Director: Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Producer: Nonzee Nimibutr, Duangkamol Limcharoen, Wouter Barendrecht, Hiromi Aihara
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Sinitta Boonyasak, Laila Boonyasak, Yutaka Matsushige, Riki Takeuchi, Takashi Miike, Thiti Phum-orn full cast
Duration: 92 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
To the letter
Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.
Mind over matter
David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.
Fool's gold
Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.
We are the championed
Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."
A history of violence
Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.
True romantic
James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.
Playing in the dark
MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.
Junk bonds
Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.
What do you think?
Post your review now