This week for our look at a featured Letterboxd List we’re hitting the video store. No, unfortunately, not a physical one. But I do have the next best thing: it’s the Letterboxd Video Store list! As I browsed the shelves, I decided to rent something very much not in my wheelhouse: anime, with All You Need Is Kill.
Title: All You Need Is Kill
Director: Kenichiro Akimoto
Released: June 9, 2025 (Premiere – France – Annecy International Animation Film Festival)
Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes
Rita is a bit of a loner. She keeps to herself and isn’t much interested in anybody around her. When a massive alien flower, known as Darol, randomly appears and starts causing destruction, she volunteers to help rebuild the parts of Japan it’s hit.
One day, during that volunteer work, a deadly event happens that sends Rita into a time loop. She’s stuck repeating the same day, every noise and every interaction a carbon copy of what she experienced the day before, down to conversations she only overhears. Now it’s on her to figure out why this is happening and how to break the cycle.
Full disclosure, I have no knowledge of the original source material or even the previous live-action adaptation, Edge of Tomorrow. Everything here is based solely on what this movie did or didn’t show me.
I love the bright, vibrant colors, and the animation around Darol and the surrounding landscapes is stunning. Visually, it grabs you by the collar and dares you to look away. The humans are a different story. Something about the character animation never clicked for me, and I can’t fully put my finger on why. It just doesn’t have the same life the aliens do.
The initial setup is intriguing, but it’s once Rita figures out what’s going on, the repeating day part, not why it’s happening, that things really pick up. Watching her try different options to get a different outcome, only for each attempt to end the same way: she dies, respawns back in bed at the start of the day, and does it again.
There’s just enough variety in how she approaches each version of the day to keep it from getting stale. That’s especially true once Rita meets Keiji, who’s been stuck in the same loop. It adds a new dynamic too, forcing her to work alongside someone instead of going it alone.
With a runtime of only 86 minutes, this gets in and out without overstaying its welcome. But that quick pace also slightly works against it. Because we’re moving at such a quick clip, nothing ever really gets a chance to breathe.
Even with going in blind on the source material, it still made for an entertaining and mostly enjoyable watch.