Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticWhen Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi made his return to fiction after time away in the realm of documentary, he dispensed with the idea that stories must conform to feature length. “Happy Hour,” the sprawling ensemble drama that sparked interest in him among cinephiles, ran more than five hours, and while his latest, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” boasts a conventional enough running time of 121 minutes, the film is actually composed of three short stories, stitched together and somewhat arbitrarily presented as a single package.The vignettes are, by the director’s own description, explorations of “coincidence and imagination” — the first three of what he conceived as seven stories, pointing toward what.
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