An important reminder of the trials women across the world face when reporting sexual crimes.

| Nov 21, 2024

In its devastation and familiarity, Ito’s debut feature finds company among works that realize the power of survivor testimony.

| Oct 30, 2024

It’s an unsparing, fly-on-the-wall journey through a legal and societal hellscape that raises at least as many questions as it answers.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 29, 2024

“Black Box Diaries” is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.

| Oct 29, 2024

The film is often shocking — it is also a preface to seismic change that would surely not have happened without Shiori Itō.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2024

This film is a cry of pain inflicted by Yamaguchi when she went public about the attack and by Japanese law, culture, and media.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 25, 2024

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2024

Black Box Diaries is a generous, courageous, and ultimately hopeful film end to end, cementing Ito—named by Time as one of the world’s most influential people in 2020—as a significant new voice.

| Feb 5, 2024

The film leaves on a razor’s edge between hope and despair, encouraged on the one hand by the passion with which justice is being demanded and, on the other, depressed by the widespread indifference with which these demands are met.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 1, 2024

With unflinching access, we trail Ito as she covertly records conversations, desperately chasing leads before the truth can be buried for good.

| Jan 31, 2024

“Black Box Diaries” is an anguished and urgent personal documentary—a film of investigation, confrontation, and action.

| Jan 30, 2024

The film is all the more impactful for Ito’s novelistic approach to crime and justice in a country that prides itself on being among the world’s most civilized nations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 29, 2024

Shiori Itō changed the world. And Black Box Diaries is a monument to her determination and sacrifice, as well as one of the best documentaries you’ll see all year.

| Jan 25, 2024

It’s a genuinely empowering film but also absolutely clear-eyed about the challenges that remain for women in Japan.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2024

Throughout the film we viscerally feel Ito's courage as speaks truth to power.

| Jan 23, 2024

We are allowed to see not only the facts of her case, but the immense toll this fight takes on her life.

| Jan 23, 2024

A remarkably intimate non-fiction exposé about the ordeals women suffer after being sexually assaulted—and the strength, courage and togetherness required to change that status quo.

| Jan 22, 2024

Despite issues of journalistic objectivity, some of which the film grapples with and some it ignores, this is a galvanizing portrait of a beleaguered heroine forcing her society into recognizing the need for change.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 22, 2024

In this vital interrogation of systemic injustice, Ito shows us all that it is possible to survive something that feels insurmountable.

| Jan 21, 2024

A pulverising illustration of truth and its consequences.

| Jan 21, 2024