At the start of first-time feature director Ryuya Suzuki’s animated film Jinsei, our protagonist reveals the last time he was called by his birth name. The circumstances are tragic but in Suzuki’s unique visual style, they’re also a little funny, a little weird, and a lot interesting. Thus begins the 10-chapter tale of a man called by many names over nearly 100 years – all portrayed through truly out-of-this-world animation.

To explain in detail the film’s plot would do little to explain its appeal. Suzuki, who animated the film by himself over 18 months, told The Japan Times that there was no script to guide him, only a theme of identity. While this sort of surprise-based storytelling meant as a viewer I couldn’t predict what happened next, it made any themes other than the main overarching one impossible to parse. Jinsei’s multi-named protagonist – at times called Kuro, Se-chan, and even God (all voiced by Japanese rapper Ace Cool) – is also very aloof in tone, his cool demeanor only broken by sudden acts of violence. By the film’s midway point, there’s little concrete to hold onto within the story and there’s always a risk of floating away from the onscreen action entirely.

But that’s where the beauty of Suzuki’s animation saves what otherwise is a pretty jumbled narrative. Japanese animation, or anime, has become a staple of the international cinematic landscape, especially after OVA screenings (original video animations, usually based on manga or episodic anime shows) proved incredibly profitable for theatres post-lockdown. Yet Jinsei looks nothing like the visual explosion of a Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train. Its muted color palette of gray, darker gray, and navy blue keep even the most cosmic scenes grounded in the personal interactions between characters. 

Here, the inspiration Suzuki claims of live-action classics like Battle Royale, The Worst Person in the World, and Scarface shines through. The language he develops is playful yet deliberate, and most of how we emotionally engage with the protagonist and surrounding players is through striking images: a swan flying to show a dream of true freedom or bloody underwear to reveal a deeply tragic decision. Most notable, though, is how time passing is portrayed across the film’s multi-decade spanning runtime. When we’re first introduced to our protagonist in 2008, scenes luxuriate in childhood slowness – everything feels like forever even when it’s only six months – but as he grows older, time picks up the pace until at last shown as a captivating montage going too fast to ever fully appreciate. 

There are many films where formulating a star “rating” feels at odds with my personal experience of the picture. How can I rate a movie where I was both dazzled and frustrated, often in the same scenes? Maybe this is just the rub when an obviously talented director has mastered one skill but hasn’t quite figured out the whole tool belt. I see so much potential in Suzuki’s skill as an image-creator, and his process with Jinsei where he created the scenes over an 18-month crunch makes for an exciting behind-the-scenes story. Is a beautiful vision enough to overwhelm the fragmented foundation its narrative stands on? Every viewer’s answer will be different. Personally? I’m interested to see where Suzuki goes next – hopefully with a script in hand.

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This article appears in June 12 • 2026.

It’s been nearly two months since Morgan Neville’s amusing and thoroughly superficial Lorne, in which the Oscar-winning documentarian tried and failed to get the Saturday Night Live creator to let down his guard. So I guess we were overdue for a new Saturday Night Live-based documentary.

Josh Greenbaum’s Playing POTUS isn’t exactly a Saturday Night Live-based documentary — not in the way the various SNL50 docs or films focusing on high-profile SNL alums like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy were Saturday Night Live-based documentaries. But for all of its ostensible focus on a wide variety of comic impressions and impersonations of presidents, I’d estimate that at least 75 percent of the documentary’s 93-minute running time is dedicated to Saturday Night Live.

As Playing POTUS: SNL’s 50 Years of Presidents, this vague adaptation of Peter Funt’s book titled Playing POTUS: The Power of America’s ‘Acting Presidents’ is fine. It’s missing some key interview subjects and dodges or entirely misses some key topics, but when you have talent as clever and enthusiastic as Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon and Darrell Hammond, you’re bound to find some insights and ample entertainment.

However, as Playing POTUS: Not Just SNL, it’s barely functional, to a degree of near pointlessness. The failure to analyze or even acknowledge countless comic interpretations of presidents in contexts that lack Lorne Michaels is so thoroughly bizarre that the entire documentary becomes more head-scratching than enlightening. Though like Neville’s Lorne, it’s at least an entertaining trifle.

The frustrating thing about Playing POTUS is that it starts off reasonably promising, using John F. Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader, whose comedy record The First Family is one of the strangest winners of the Grammy for album of the year. It isn’t deep historical context, but it’s absolutely historical context, followed by a swift jog through the Smothers Brothers and…that’s pretty much it for comic presidential impersonations before Saturday Night Live.

The meat of the documentary is the different SNL presidents talking about their individual impressions, their origins and their causally unprovable impacts on the perception of those presidents.

This is the best part of the documentary, whether it’s Chevy Chase cackling at the possibility that he might have contributed to Gerald Ford’s speedy electoral defeat; Dana Carvey talking (for possibly the millionth time) about how he was so stymied by George Bush that he cobbled together a character who often had nothing at all to do with its source; Alec Baldwin reading both negative tweets from Donald Trump and, proudly, his own responses; or Kate McKinnon getting emotional still talking about her version of Hillary Clinton and Hillary’s 2016 defeat.

Greenbaum and his subjects are willing to acknowledge some of the less successful impressions over the years — “Of all the presidents who have ever been on SNL, I think I was my least favorite” Will Forte says of following Will Ferrell as George Bush Junior — as well as the lengthy struggles to find an appropriate Obama or Joe Biden.

With the help of a couple of experts, Playing POTUS does well with explaining how frequently SNL‘s impressions have achieved a level of hyper-reality, in which the heightened Xerox supplants the actual historical figure in the collective consciousness. In that light, though, it’s strange not to dedicate a single second to then-candidate Donald Trump’s appearance hosting Saturday Night Live.

Although the documentary suffers a little from the absence of Tina Fey as part of a lengthy segment on her Sarah Palin impression and its effect on the 2008 election, that probably should have made Greenbaum realize that not only was Palin never elected POTUS (nor was Hillary Clinton, it should be added), she wasn’t elected veep either. Playing POTUS also covers Maya Rudolph’s impression of Kamala Harris, who doesn’t technically align with the title. Perhaps that all could have been 15 minutes redistributed into non-SNL terrain.

Keegan-Michael Key is great discussing the origins of Luther, Obama’s anger translator. Rich Little is present to discuss general impressions. Seth Meyers is part of a decent segment on the history of presidential roasting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

But if the topic is meant to be broad, it’s head-scratching to ignore The Simpsons, South Park and any movie that took a comic approach to a specifically named president — Dick, W., Vice, etc. In this film’s universe, In Living Color apparently never existed, nor did Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s That’s My Bush!, a multi-cam sitcom about George W. Bush and his family. Mad TV is mentioned only nebulously, though full credit to Will Sasso, the only talking head in the documentary capable of expressing regret at how much and how wrongly Monica Lewinsky was lampooned in conjunction with Bill Clinton.

There’s something astonishingly and instantly dated about how thoroughly Greenbaum misses the way new media has and continues to approach Donald Trump. Sarah Cooper may have been a flash-in-the-pan, but if you can’t find something substantive to say about how a multi-racial woman became a fleeting sensation lip-synching Donald Trump, you’re not trying very hard.

Instead, Greenbaum, who did far better and smarter work with many of the same people in Too Funny to Fail and Will & Harper, wastes time on a voiceover device that’s too cutesy to be worth the effort and a three-act structure that’s more for the benefit of his editors than the audience. It all results in a potentially meaningful documentary that isn’t bad, just lacking.

The reviews are in for Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi flick Disclosure Day – and so far the consensus is that the great director has delivered another worthy addition to his canon of alien movies.

The film – which is released in UK cinemas today – currently boasts a score of 85 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes after 137 reviews, while its score on fellow review aggregator is 74 based on 47 reviews.

While those scores are a little lower than his previous two movies The Fabelmans (92 per cent on RT and 85 on Metacritic) and West Side Story (91 per cent on RT and 85 on Metacritic), it still indicates that the vast majority of critics were broadly on board with new movies.

Radio Times gave a mixed 3 star review in the film, praising the iconic filmmaker for injecting some of his classic awe-inspiring moments into the movie that “highlight why for so long Spielberg has been considered the unimpeachable king of entertaining big-budget filmmaking”.

We also gave a positive verdict on the performances – particularly from Emily Blunt – but remarked that the screenplay from regular Spielberg collaborator David Koepp “has a clunky and unfocused quality that occasionally makes it difficult to truly fall under the film’s spell”.

Elsewhere, the film received 4-star reviews from The Guardian, The Independent, The Evening Standard and Empire Magazine, while on the other end of the spectrum there were 2-star verdicts from The Times, The Telegraph, Little White Lies and BBC.

Meanwhile, the film perhaps received more glowing praise across the pond, with top marks from RogerEbert.com and positive write-ups in The Atlantic, IndieWire, Vulture and The Hollywood Reporter.

Disclosure Day stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Colin Firth, with the synopsis reading: “As a massive government conspiracy unravels, a targeted whistleblower races against time to bring about the extraordinary event that will change human history forever: the day of ultimate alien disclosure.”

Disclosure Day is released in cinemas on Wednesday 10 June 2026.

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