The most shockingly violent film in the Competition at the Tokyo International Festival this year was also the most stunningly poetic, with an exquisite use of sound that rivets the spectator to the screen.

The buzz at the opening gala party of this year's Tokyo International Film Festival among journalists was whether the intensifying Japan-China conflict about the Senkaku Islands was going to affect the festival.

This is the only film in 3-D I have ever seen where the 3-D worked as part of the film, instead of as an added contrivance. Yet Flashback Memories 3D is a movie that is bound to disconcert spectators -- and in fact, many leaving the theater commented that they did not "get it" in the first minutes.