Celebrated filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to the pages of Japanese manga for inspiration once again, unveiling this thoughtful adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s acclaimed 2021 coming-of-age one-shot, Look Back. Reuniting actresses Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita, both of whom featured prominently in the director’s 2023 Netflix drama series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, the film tells the story of two burgeoning young mangaka, who meet in junior high school and forge a life-long friendship.

Look Back was previously brought to the screen in 2024 by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, whose 58-minute anime was met with rapturous praise and no small degree of surprise. Up until that point, there had been only glimpses of this kind of emotional tenderness in Fujimoto’s work, who was best known for creating the visually audacious action fantasy series Chainsaw Man, whose box-office-busting feature Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc dazzled audiences at home and abroad.

Kore-eda expands the narrative to feature-length for his live-action adaptation, but does so without tampering too much with the manga’s carefully structured narrative. If the pace does suffer somewhat as a result, it compensates for its languidness with consistently striking visuals, gorgeously captured on 35mm by cinematographer Senzo Ueno.

Read my full South China Morning Post review here