Weekend Movie Forecast: Up or Drag Me to Hell

Academy Award-winning Japanese film Departures—the movie that made many of us lose this year's Oscar pool—is getting distributed to the public at last. The story concerns a young cellist who decides to return with his adoring wife Mika to his hometown in Japan's far north. "Searching for work, he responds to a cryptic classified ad for work in 'Departures' only to find out that the position is in the field of 'encoffining,' the ritual preparation of a corpse before it is placed in a casket for cremation." Ella Taylor at the Village Voice says "Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue. Amid the culture of cheating and heedless one-upmanship that has brought the globe to its knees, it's a lovely thing to meet a movie that refuses to divorce what it means to be a professional from what it means to be a mensch."