Godzilla Minus One — A Monster in Moral Pain

The best Godzilla film since the 1954 original is a Japanese drama about postwar survivor's guilt, and it happens to also contain the best sequence of monster destruction in about forty years. Takashi Yamazaki, working on a production budget roughly 1/20th of a typical American blockbuster, has made a film that Hollywood would not even attempt: a character-driven reckoning with national trauma that uses the monster as a moral mirror.

The human story — a former kamikaze pilot, unable to die, trying to build a family in the ruins of Tokyo — is what drives the film. When Godzilla finally walks ashore in Ginza, you feel the horror because the film has earned it. The effects are miraculous. The physical weight of the monster, the way Tokyo shakes under his footfalls, the slow-motion geyser of atomic breath — it looks, and this is saying something, better than Hollywood's more expensive efforts.

Currently at Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre Toronto (IMAX), Scotiabank Chinook Calgary, Cineplex Yorkdale, Landmark Kelowna.