Daisato transforms himself into a stocky, stick-wielding giant who is several stories high in order to defend Japan and its citizens. However, unlike his predecessors, who were all national heroes, he is an outcast among the people he protects.

"Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties, and these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. In Ossos, after a suicidal teenage girl gives birth, she misguidedly entrusts her baby's safety to the troubled, deadbeat father. In Vanda's Room is...