prison visit Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Kaneko’s Commissary
(Kaneko Sashiireten,
金子差入店)

Director – Go Furukawa – 2025 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 125m

****

An ex-con runs a service delivering clothing, other supplies and messages from loved ones to convicted prisoners – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 which runs from Friday, 6th February to Tuesday, 31st March

A young mum, babe in arms, takes bags for her husband to a drop-off facility / creche so she can visit him in prison. The helpful assistant informs her that the commissary will be unable to accept most of the contents of the bag – basically, any clothing other than underwear. And off she goes for a prison visit with her husband, who has anger management issues and takes out on her the fact that she failed to visit last month, telling her, “it’s easy for you to abandon me.” His unabated rating and verbal abuse eventually drives her to a primal scream before she walks out, leaving him to ask, redundantly, after she’s left, if their child has been born yet.

His visit isn’t from her but the self-announced “Kaneko from Hosoda’s Commissary”, who has a deliver from his wife; divorce papers to sign.… Read the rest

Eileen

Director – William Oldroyd – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 97 m

***** Most of the film

* The last five minutes

NSFW

In the 1960s, the life of a young woman working in a Boston boys’ correctional facility is turned on its head by the arrival of a radical, young woman prison psychologist from New York – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 1st.

I don’t usually start with the ending of the film – and I’m not about to deliver a spoiler – but the ending of Oldroyd’s otherwise enthralling drama (if that’s the right term – I’m not sure it is) takes everything that has gone before which appeared to be building up to something and unceremoniously dumps it, as if there were another twenty minutes that had been written but not shot and an unsatisfactory ending had been tacked on.

There’s always that feeling with a truly extraordinary movie when you watch it for the first time that you don’t want the filmmakers to screw up and let go of whatever it is that’s working. Well, this one is extraordinary right up to the last five minutes, when it completely loses it. Prior to that, it starts out as one thing, turns into something else then swerves and moves about all over the place, taking the viewer with it on a strange, unpredictable journey.… Read the rest