Bad Lieutenant Tokyo: Miike Still Draws Blood
There is a version of the film industry that plays it safe, and then there is Takashi Miike, who has spent thirty years being the thing safe cinema builds walls to keep out.
Bad Lieutenant Tokyo: Miike Still Draws Blood
There is a version of the film industry that plays it safe, and then there is Takashi Miike, who has spent thirty years being the thing safe cinema builds walls to keep out. The announcement that *Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo* will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival before a Neon stateside release is the kind of news that makes you put your phone down and actually pay attention. Miike directing a Japanese neo-noir saga is not a pitch — it is a provocation, and the director of *Audition* has earned the right to every inch of that word.
The rest of the week's cultural conversation has been, let's be honest, a little easier to predict. Netflix isn't the only streaming story worth watching — Spotify just crossed 300 million premium subscribers in Q2, sitting at 777 million monthly active users total, which is a number so large it stops feeling like a music platform and starts feeling like infrastructure. You don't opt out of infrastructure. You just pay it.
Jane Schoenbrun's *Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* is getting the kind of early reviews that make the arthouse crowd feel briefly smug — the *I Saw the TV Glow* director leaning into sapphic slasher territory with Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder generating the kind of onscreen chemistry that critics are already running out of synonyms to describe. Smart casting, sharp instincts, and a title that does half the marketing work for free. Worth watching closely before someone you know spoils the whole architecture in a voice note.
Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg's *The Debut* — a musical comedy starring Julianne Moore — is closing the 70th BFI London Film Festival, which is either a warm send-off or a gentle burial depending on how the U.K. premiere lands. Eisenberg as director has interesting bones. The musical comedy wrapper is either inspired or a miscalculation. Festival audiences tend to be forgiving. Critics are not.
And then there is Samantha Morton, quietly saying what nobody wants to hear — that a strong performance in a Christopher Nolan blockbuster, one earning genuine Oscar conversation, did not open any doors after *The Odyssey*. "The politics of the industry has changed massively," she said, and the sentence just sat there, landing the way true things land.
The industry will give you the record. It will not give you the next job.
