Obsession drives great filmmakers to success and disaster. Anime director Mamoru Oshii’s fascination with biblical imagery led to him getting fired from the prestigious Lupin III franchise for proposing a story about the gentleman thief stealing Lucifer’s fossilized skeleton. Undeterred, Oshii took the script’s stranger elements and made them weirder still with Angel’s Egg, a metaphorically dense parable about a boy, a girl, and a giant egg. Enigmatic to the point of being obtuse, it was such a box office bomb in Japan that it remained unreleased internationally theatrically for the last 40 years. Now, a director-approved 4K restoration allows audiences to immerse themselves in this strange and dismal world of hope more fragile than an eggshell. – Richard Whittaker
