The 100th Love with You

Sho Tsukikawa's 2017 Japanese film adapts the time loop template to a love story. Aoi Hinata, a university student, has an accident on 27 July; waking, she finds herself in a classroom a week before it. She begins living the same week again and tries to understand why she is there. The structure works by switching point of view in the second half: what the viewer assumed about who is in the loop turns out to be wrong. That turn keeps the template fresh. The presence of the singer miwa as an actor, and her music, explain the film's popularity in Japan. Its narrative weakness is a resolution that arrives too neatly and explains too much. Who it's for: viewers who like Japanese romantic drama and time loop stories. Who it's not for: anyone who will find the melodrama excessive, or troubled by death used as a romantic device.