Oh Lucy!

(Japan-USA, comedy/drama, 95 min., unrated) Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is a single woman stuck with a drab, meaningless job in Tokyo. But when she’s convinced by her niece, Mika to enroll in an unorthodox English class that requires her to wear a blonde wig and take on an American alter ego, the new identity awakens something within her, and she develops romantic feelings for her American instructor, John (Josh Hartnett). “An against-the-odds charmer about a woman, a tragic wig and an improbable journey. It’s a near-minor miracle that just about everything works in this emphatically modest comedy-drama, which draws on squishy types and themes — the lonely eccentric, the cross-cultural clash, the revelatory trip — that can quickly sink less nimble features.” — New York Times