Whether you’re a veteran of the arthouse scene or simply interested in the emerging otaku subculture of anime fans around the world, this column lists curated titles that challenge, comfort, and sometimes subvert your expectations.
Some stories begin where habits tell us to stop. This week’s pick, Freeren: Beyond the End of the Journey (Streaming on Crunchyroll/Netflix) and perfect day (Available on MUBI) Explore a life already shaped by consequences and ask how meaning reorganizes itself once the apparent goal is gone.
from the drawing board
Having premiered two years ago, receiving almost universal praise and now sitting undisputedly at the pinnacle of My AnimeList’s all-time anime rankings, Freeren: Beyond the End of the Journey Opens on the long shadow of an ending legend.The symbolic Demon King has fallen, the songs have been written, and history has already condensed a decade of companionship into one heroic image. For the titular elven mage, whose lifespan is beyond easy measurement, those 10 years register as brief and almost weightless, a pleasant twist whose emotional cost only becomes apparent when it’s too late to adjust for it.
The series takes shape around what happens next. Freren sets out again, this time to understand the people with whom she once traveled without fully paying attention. She now has a human apprentice, Fern, and a young warrior, Stark. Their days are spent moving between villages, handling small tasks, acquiring spells, and dealing with dangers that rarely turn into farce. Freyren is vastly more powerful than anyone who has come before her, yet she defaults to simple solutions, preferring basic magic and efficiency rather than performance, often because she simply wants to get back to her books. This habit, repeated over the course of years of travel, gradually reveals its emotional cost: Frieren constantly saves time, yet has no tendency to lose sight of how easily people disappear from it.
A scene from ‘Friaren: Beyond Journey’s End’ Photo Credit: Crunchyroll
Manga Kanehito Yamada’s writing earns its emotional height by allowing the final miscalculation to unfold slowly, through funerals, detours, half-hearted conversations, and chants collected for no practical reason. Madhouse’s hand-drawn craft finds its strength in control, rendering wide skies, worn stone and long roads with stoic patience, allowing the world to register as inhabited and permanent, while Ivan Call’s beautiful score penetrates with restraint, shaping emotions through the duration.
If you respond to the gentle, contemplative expanse interspersed between moments of epic high fantasy lord of the ringsOr simply want a respite from the familiar clichés and clichés of the genre, freeren Offers a promising and highly profitable place to start. It’s one of those very few actions that can capture your attention so completely that you only realize how deeply you’ve gone in when the elven wizard has already done something inexplicably gentle to you, and has left you blinking, slightly embarrassed, at the evidence.
foreign Affairs
Experienced writer Wim Wenders’ perfect dayis a film built almost entirely at forward momentum that doesn’t go anywhere new and finds itself in a different kind of afterlife. The Oscar-nominated Japanese drama centers on a middle-aged man named Hirayama who cleans public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya district as part of the Tokyo Toilet Project. He lives alone in a small flat on the other side of the river, gets up before dawn, makes his bed, waters his plants and goes to work while listening to carefully selected cassette tapes. His days are repeated with minor variations: cleaning each toilet with precision, eating lunch on the same bench under the trees, photographing sunlight through leaves, and returning home to read before bed. The film moves through the pace of their daily routine and the meanings emerge through meditation. It’s a life built intentionally, one habit at a time, with no interest in external validation.
Koji Yakusho has delivered one of the great performances of 2023. He plays Hirayama with a face that ages for decades without any explanation. His joys remain modest and intensely personal; His intimate relationship with Tokyo is recorded as a series of surfaces and sounds. Wenders’s camera remains close, restrained, and patient, confident that the repetition will maintain its gravitas.
If cinema based on peace and careful composition attracts you, perfect day Yasujirō moves into conversation with the domestic rigor of Ozu and the way Kelly Reichardt constructs meaning through labor, patience, and the steady accumulation of memory, all without reaching spectacle.
A scene from ‘Perfect Days’ Photo Credit: MUBI
put together freerenThe relationship comes into focus through trajectory. Each story follows a character past the moment that once defined them, tracking as accomplishments diminish and daily cares take over. Freren moves across millennia and landscapes, slowly learning to register the people walking beside her before time takes them away, while Hirayama maintains his position, and finds that standing still, when done carefully, generates momentum of its own.
Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the limitless offerings of world cinema and anime.
published – January 23, 2026 05:29 PM IST