Cloud (2024) plays Japan Cuts 2025 before opening in NYC Friday and around the country soon after

Yoshii, a reseller with a questionable reputation, moves with his girlfriend to the country and finds trouble has followed him.

This is he latest of Kiyoshi Kurasowa's films and it's a very bumpy film that is the master at his messiest. Seriously, if you have been playing along and wondering about some of the weird turns in some of his films (a Plesiasaur shows up at the end of REAL), this film is probably going to confuse you more. The first half of the the film is a drama about a man focused on making a buck at any cost and then it morphs into a revenge/action film before summing up as a kind of rant against consumerism. While the film is watchable, I'm not sure it is any good. 

The problem here is the script. It doesn't feel like it ever got past a first draft. The characters are mostly not there. Yoshii is one note (he sits and watches his product sell), his girlfriend is not there enough to to have us truly buy how shallow she is (or the final turn), his assistant is nothing until he becomes James Bond and the people hunting Yoshii seem to have been made up randomly. 

Things get worse when you realize that the plotting makes no sense internally. For example Yoshii is so hated on line that the customers want to kill him, but the question becomes if everyone knows his products suck why do they continually buy from him? Worse, if he knows he's in danger why doesn't he change his on-line identity? One of the people hunting Yoshii is a wanted killer? The world we are seeing makes no real world sense, hell it makes no sense in its own world (I mean they trap Yoshii in a house but never look to see if there is another door- I mean they could have walked in as Yoshii did if they just went around back.)

To be honest the second half of the film mostly works, but it has had it's feet removed by the dead first half.

I've been a fan of Kurosawa's for 35 years and I've ridden his up and down slate of films, but this is the first time I ever wanted to walk out of a film because this is the first time I ever felt early on he was not going to pull it out. He kind of does but at the same time I don't think I will ever waste time on this film again. With all of the truly great films he's made of the years I'm left wondering why this one is getting the big push.

For fans only