All the Long Nights 2024

Two work colleagues: he suffers from panic attacks, she has extreme PMS. Their company distributes toy planetariums. What may not sound like Ozu Yasujirō is actually precisely that: people are attentive and do each other good, without even realising.

Review

Nobody is broken in Shô Miyake’s films; nobody is quite beyond repair. But over the course of his last few features, the Japanese director has centered characters who are at at least mildly sprained, and trying hard to get by on hope and a homemade splint. In his previous movie, “Small Slow But Steady” — a title that incidentally could be a manifesto for Miyake’s soft, low-key style — a deaf female amateur boxer battled self-doubt and the looming closure of her beloved gym. And his new film, “All the Long Nights” offers a similar kind of balm, this time focusing on a young woman whose major challenge comes from debilitating PMS. It’s an affliction rarely described with this much compassion, when it is mentioned at all outside its regular context as the lazy punchline to a thousand sexist jokes.