Hamaguchi's literary cinema continues to pay dividends with rich character portraits filled with small observations, little ironies and a mastery of moral and existential ambiguity that seems to be missing these days from actual literature. This triptych of narratively unrelated stories is united by a shared interest in the way that misunderstandings, chance, and the unpredictability of human connection that leaves plenty of space for characters to be redefined just as quickly as you get to know them, and even for pivotal moments to be played out in multiple ways imagined and actual. Consider how the man who becomes an inadvertent point in a love triangle in the first segment is first defined in glowingly romantic terms by a potential…

Short stories don’t often get the respect they deserve, and short films — which the film industry has deemed worthless rather than figure out how to monetize — don’t often get any respect at all. Unless, that is, several of them are packaged to resemble a feature, like three kids stacked on top of each other inside a trenchcoat and trying to pass for a single adult.

A playful triptych of self-contained vignettes (complete with their own credit blocks) that are bound together by a shared fascination with memory, coincidence, and the deep truths that shallow lies tend to uncover, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s wonderfully beguiling “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is neither fish nor fowl. It feels more like a single…

There's this moment after the major scene of the first segment when Ayumu Nakajima is forced to ponder the role he is playing in the story he is suddenly trapped in and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy as whole mostly plays as a series of deliberate echoes of this idea a series of fictions and roles and how every character decides to adapt to them. The short story format allowing it often to end in a different kind of grace note that suggest an out of their careful constructions. My understand is that Hamaguchi name dropped Rohmer's Randez-vous in Paris as a reference point and there's indeed a very Roohmerian quality to how Hamaguchi approaches imagines his fiction and allow…

Throughout life, there are countless decisions we make, whether consciously or not, that result in drastic changes we may never know about. An impulsive confession, a misspelled email, a bad memory, each little moment has the potential for large consequences born from nothing other than pure coincidence and imagination.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy invites us to look at these moments, through the lens of a select few short stories. Hamaguchi has prepared for us a script in which people are put into such positions, on the precipice of something life-altering but without the knowledge of such. Some are the ones enacting the change, and others reacting to it, but what's especially compelling is the way these characters push-and-pull in…

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is truly Ryusuke Hamaguchi's magnum opus, and his quirky style and spontaneous brilliance at their finest. Hamaguchi's ability to extract poetic beauty out of nuances in everyday life is simply second to none.

As a romance anthology, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy boasts three short stories, each of which demonstrates a surreal, unpredictable and ultimately reassured instance of serendipity that's both Japanese and universal. Despite its lukewarm first story, which feels like an average Hong Sang Soo impression, Wheel immediately picks up its pace with its second story, which depicts human connections in Hamaguchi's typical wistful, relatable manner, and features some of the most impressive acting showcases in Hamaguchi's filmography. The third story, the perfect…

There are few distances in the world greater than the space occupied by all the words that go unsaid between two people. 

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” though, has a way of making this chasm of the unmentioned possess an uncommon intimacy. 

Hamaguchi’s precursor to his worldwide breakthrough of “Drive My Car,” “Wheel” teeters on a precipice of change in the director’s career. With its format of three independent stories, each depicting different relationships; platonic, romantic, and otherwise, the film has a momentum of recurrent passage that presses it along. Change; or perish to time. 

Similar to “Drive My Car,” the stakes of “Wheel” rest entirely in dialogue; making communication itself the force of all progression. Hamaguchi traps…

As social beings, communication is a part of our everyday lives. Whether through speech, writing, facial expressions, gestures, or body language, we constantly convey our thoughts and feelings to each other. However, most of us leave many conversations wishing we had said more or less or worded things differently. That's what this film is all about.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is made up of three conversational segments. They seem relatively normal and uninteresting at their starts, but layers of emotions and complicated issues reveal themselves the longer each conversation carries on. The film's beauty lies in its naturalism and simplicity.

These are conversations we've had or heard before and situations that aren't out of the realm of possibilities. Furthermore,…