This is another one of those films that I would have never seen without the good graces of the Criterion Channel: Kyoshi Kurosawa's 2012 Penance. I'm not a huge Kurosawa fan, or maybe it would be better to say that I like his films although I don't like them as much as I think I should. It's not that I want to say I like Kyoshi Kurosawa films because I want people to think that I'm a sophisticated consumer of films, but rather that in some ways I like the idea of Kyoshi Kurosawa more than the reality of his films. They are always creepy and unique, but they're also awfully slow moving (which is almost never a problem for me, obviously). In this case it is especially true because Penance is a series of five interrelated films, each a little over an hour long, which tells the story of a group of girls who witness the disappearance of another young girl, although none of them can remember the face of the man who took her. The murdered girl's mother blames them and curses them all to do penance for their crime in not remembering. I'm in the middle of the five films, so I suppose I should have waited until the end, but I'm so far behind in my posts that I took the opportunity to mention Penance, although it's more of a placeholder at this point. At this point I'd say it's worth checking out, although I don't know if I would give it a glowing recommendation yet. More later.
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