Whether you’re an old hand at arthouse or just dipping a toe into the rising otaku subculture of anime aficionados around the world, this column lists curated titles that challenge, comfort, and occasionally combust your expectations.
Some stories begin where habits tells us to stop. This week’s picks, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (streaming on Crunchyroll/ Netflix) and Perfect Days (available on MUBI) trace lives already shaped by consequence and ask how meaning reorganises itself once the obvious goals have dissolved.
From the drawing board
Having premiered two years ago, drawing near-universal acclaim and now sitting undisputedly at the summit of MyAnimeList’s all-time anime rankings, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End opens on the long shadow of a finished legend.The token Demon King has fallen, the songs have been written, and history has already compressed a decade of companionship into a single heroic silhouette. For the titular elven mage, whose lifespan stretches beyond easy measurement, those 10 years register as brief and almost weightless, a pleasant detour whose emotional cost only surfaces once it is far too late to adjust for it.
The series takes shape around what follows. Frieren sets out again, this time to understand the people she once travelled beside without fully noticing. She is now accompanied by a human apprentice, Fern, and a young warrior, Stark. Their days are spent moving between villages, handling minor jobs, retrieving spells, and dealing with threats that rarely escalate into spectacle. Frieren remains vastly more powerful than almost anyone they encounter, yet she defaults to modest solutions, preferring basic magic and efficiency over display, often because she simply wants to get back to her books. That habit, repeated over years of travel, gradually reveals its emotional cost: Frieren saves time constantly, yet has no instinct for how easily people disappear from it.
A still from ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll
Mangaka Kanehito Yamada’s writing earns its emotional heft by allowing that previous miscalculation to surface slowly, through funerals, detours, half-remembered conversations, and spells collected for no practical reason at all. Madhouse’s hand-drawn craft finds its strength in control, rendering wide skies, worn stone, and long roads with steady patience, allowing the world to register as inhabited and enduring, while Evan Call’s beautiful score enters sparingly, giving shape to emotion through duration.
If you respond to the gentle, reflective stretches interspersed between moments of epic high fantasy in The Lord of the Rings, or simply want relief from familiar fantasy tropes and well-worn genre habits, Frieren offers a promising and deeply rewarding place to begin. It’s one of the very few works that can hold your attention so completely that you only realise how deeply you’ve been taken in when the elven mage has already done something unspeakably tender to you, and left you blinking, a little embarrassed, at the evidence.
Foreign affairs
Veteran auteur Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, is a film built almost entirely out of forward motion that goes nowhere new and finds itself in a different sort of afterlife. The Oscar-nominated Japanese drama follows Hirayama, a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets across Tokyo’s Shibuya district as part of the Tokyo Toilet project. He lives alone in a small flat on the other side of the river, wakes before dawn, folds his bedding, waters his plants, and drives to work listening to carefully chosen cassette tapes. His days repeat with minor variation: cleaning each restroom with precision, eating lunch on the same bench beneath the trees, photographing sunlight through leaves, and returning home to read before sleep. The film moves at the pace of his routine and meaning surfaces through attention. This is a life assembled deliberately, one habit at a time, with no interest in external validation.
Koji Yakusho delivers one of the crushing performances of 2023. He plays Hirayama with a face that holds decades without explanation. His pleasures remain modest and fiercely personal; his intimate trysts with Tokyo register as a series of surfaces and sounds. Wenders’ camera stays close, composed and patient, trusting that repetition will carry its gravity.
If cinema grounded in stillness and careful composition draws you in, Perfect Days moves in conversation with Yasujiro Ozu’s domestic rigour and with the way Kelly Reichardt builds meaning through labour, patience, and the steady accumulation of memory, all without reaching for spectacle.
A still from ‘Perfect Days’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
Placed alongside Frieren, the relationship comes into focus through trajectory. Each story stays with a character after the moment that might once have defined them, tracking what remains when achievement recedes and daily care takes over. Frieren moves forward across millennia and landscapes, slowly learning to register the people walking beside her before time carries them away, while Hirayama holds his ground, discovering that staying still, when done with attention, generates its own kind of momentum.
Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the boundless offerings of world cinema and anime.
Published – January 23, 2026 05:29 pm IST
