To be released tomorrow on DVD

A genius of dread, known for his unnerving horror films and eerie thrillers, the wildly prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tends to ply his trade with spooky silences, a lived-in feel for everyday, droning life and a sense of social unease. Though his latest to hit the American big screen, Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama — if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair — there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.

In many respects, the family members here don’t look much different from the characters who populate Kurosawa’s other movies, some of whom are inexplicably driven to kill. Inexplicably or perhaps just unexplained: Unlike most genre directors in Hollywood and other commercial provenances, Kurosawa spends little time illuminating the mysteries of life, death and murder, the great whys that preoccupy filmmakers and invariably reduce being to behaviorism or DNA. It isn’t that interpretation has no place in his work. It’s entirely possible, for instance, to see the multitudes of drifting jellyfish in his 2003 movie Bright Future as a symbol for Japanese youth gripped by anomie. Yet while that interpretation has its satisfactions, it doesn’t really explain why one character massacres an entire family.

The bloodletting is more metaphoric in his new movie, which, soon after the opening credits, cuts to a Tokyo office where corporate drones are briskly marching through the corridors. Minutes later, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), an administrative middle manager, has packed his belongings in a paper shopping bag and headed out, having been rendered redundant. (One Chinese employee, a drone says, can do the work of two Japanese staffers.) Instead of telling his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), however, Ryuhei continues to leave the house every morning, wearing a suit and tie and carrying his briefcase, props in an elaborate, increasingly desperate pantomime that takes him from standing in the unemployment lines to scrubbing public toilets on his hands and knees.

As Ryuhei tries to keep up appearances, his family’s facade crumbles. The oldest son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), seeks to enlist in the American military, which, to support its expanding war in the Middle East, has begun to accept foreign recruits. (However satiric Kurosawa’s intent, this idea didn’t sound all that far-fetched when I saw the movie.) The youngest son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), meanwhile, begins using his lunch money to pay for piano lessons given by a melancholic beauty, Kaneko (Haruka Igawa). Lying on the sofa one night, Megumi poignantly asks Ryuhei to pull her up, but he’s already left the room. Raising her arms, she entreats “Somebody, please lift me up,” but we’re the only ones listening.

Though no one does help her, Megumi ends up on a wild ride with a near-crazed would-be thief played by the great Koji Yakusho, the star of a handful of Kurosawa’s best films, including Cure.(Non-Japanese audiences might best remember him from the wistful romance Shall We Dance?) By the time she heads off, the family has scattered like leaves, blown down such divergent paths that there are moments when it feels as if each were inhabiting an entirely different movie. Yet as the family disperses, Kurosawa ceaselessly brings them together through the editing. Long before the movie’s unexpectedly moving finale, which pivots on an ethereal rendition of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, he keeps the discordant layers of his composition in harmonious play.

As it ticks through the familiar ills brought about by a country outsourcing and downsizing itself into crisis, Tokyo Sonata takes on increasingly uncanny and timely resonance for an American audience. Kurosawa’s social critiques rarely reverberate as loudly as this one: Ryuhei and Megumi even argue about his patriarchal authority, a fight that begins on a note of pathos but soon turns scarily violent: Having been victimized by his employer and, by extension, the country that creates the conditions for these harsh economic realities, the paterfamilias becomes a victimizer. But this being a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie, nothing else happens the way you expect, particularly given the lessons you glean from other movies, including the similarly themed, more despairing 2001 French film Time Out.

Despite the catastrophes visited on the family and a few other characters, and in spite of its deep well of melancholia, Tokyo Sonata ends on a strangely, almost insistently optimistic note. Much of that optimism emanates from the youngest son, whose desire to play the piano becomes a form of generational resistance against his father, who, without explanation, insists he do no such thing. Domination, like family life, has become a hollow ritual here. (“I’m home,” everyone says on returning to the house, as the mother answers, “Welcome home.”) An economic crisis shakes the family up — it brings the father to his knees, lifts the mother, almost destroys one son and liberates the other — but it’s art, useless art, that unites them. Grade: A-minus

Also being released tomorrow:

Art & Copy (2009) Directed by Doug Pray. A documentary that reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time — people who’ve profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. The film is essentially a skillful advertising-industry infomercial that speaks its subject’s slick aesthetic language. Grade: B

The Blue Tooth Virgin (2009) Directed by Russell Brown. When magazine editor David (Bryce Johnson) reluctantly confesses that he’s not too fond of his buddy Sam’s (Austin Peck) latest screenplay effort, the admission threatens to destroy the longtime relationship between the two best friends. Starts out feeling a little too “inside Hollywood” and only grows more so as it rolls along. By the end, this small film about scriptwriters ends up being mostly for scriptwriters, despite appealing performances from the two leads. Grade: D-plus

The Dukes (2008) Directed and co-written by Robert Davi. Strapped for cash they need to open a nightclub and mount a comeback, doo-wop singers George (Chazz Palminteri) and Danny (Davi) persuade their former chart-topping group the Dukes to break into a dental lab and plunder a stash of gold. Davi’s heartfelt performance makes for a winning solo, but the movie too often lacks harmony. Grade: D

Leap Year (2010) Directed by Arnand Tucker.When their four-year anniversary passes without a marriage proposal, Anna (Amy Adams) decides to take matters into her own hands. Investing in an Irish tradition that allows women to propose to men on February 29th, Anna decides to follow her boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott) to Dublin and get down on one knee herself. But airplanes, weather and fate leave Anna stranded on the other side of Ireland, and she must enlist the help of handsome and surly innkeeper (Matthew Goode) to get her across the country. Leap Year belongs to the Prada backlash subgenre of women’s pictures — epitomized by The Proposal — in which smart, stylish women must be muddied, abased, ridiculed, and degraded in order to get their man. An uneven romantic comedy that feels as fresh as a hunk of week-old soda bread. The scenery’s nice. But once you’ve said the scenery’s nice, you’re no longer talking about a movie worth talking about. Grade: D-plus

Nine (2009) Directed by Rob Marshall. A musical that follows the life of a famous film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he reaches a creative and personal crisis of epic proportion, while balancing the numerous women in his life including his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penélope Cruz), his film star muse (Nicole Kidman), his confidant and costume designer, a young American fashion journalist, the whore from his youth and his mother (Sophia Loren).Though there is plenty of razzle-dazzle onscreen, Nine is unlikely to ignite many sparks among viewers. Heck, let’s not dance around it — it’s is a dud. Grade: C-minus

Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon (2009) Directed by Mary Mazzio. A documentary featuring young inner-city students - entrepreneurs - discussing their harrowing lives and the numerous obstacles they’ve overcome as they compete to take home a $10,000 grant to start a business. Spending more observational time with Mazzio’s smart, resilient and stirringly positive subjects — even seeing less-edited footage of their business plan speeches — might have helped sell her inspirational story. Grade: C

Tetro (2009) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Two brothers (Alden Ehrenreich, Vincent Gallo) reunite in Buenos Aires after a 10-year estrangement. The movie is alive from beginning to end, and it’s a pleasure to see at least one big-name director get out of the prison of his own reputation. This is Coppola’s best film since Apocalypse Now because the filmmaker has abandoned conventional drama — what for him had become a straightjacket — indulging in a collage style that allows him to honour favourite filmmakers. Grade: B

Tooth Fairy (2010) Directed by Michael Lembeck. When minor-league hockey player Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson) — who has a penchant for knocking out his opponents’ teeth every time he plays — disillusions a fan, he is sentenced to a stint for one week as a bona fide, tutu-clad, real-life tooth fairy. For a bad, broad comedy, Tooth Fairy boasts a surprising number of positives. Which isnt to say that its good, but it could be much, much worse. Grade: C-minus