Tag: Japanese Cinema
The Scary House | 2025 Udine Far East Film Festival Review
Watanabe Smarter Than Ghosts, but The Scary House Had Other Plans
Venturing into the horror genre for the first time, Japanese indie filmmaker Watanabe Hirobumi’s...
Sexual Misorientation: Hamaguchi Prepping Paris-Shoot ‘Our Apprenticeship’
Back in May we had learned that Ryusuke Hamaguchi was revisiting with a feature film project that would bring us to Paris and it...
Evil Does Not Exist | Review
The Killing of a Sacred Dear: Hamaguchi Explores Ills of Urbanization
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi explores the doctrine about the absence of evil in his latest drama...
Monster | Review
The Children’s Hour: Kore-eda Crafts a Melodramatic Puzzle
Returning to his native Japan after venturing out to France and South Korea with his last two...
Following the Sound | 2023 Venice Film Festival Review
Not in the Script: Sugita’s New Form of Companionship Takes on Heartaches and Heartbreaks
Rewriting the notion of what it truly means to follow someone...
Love Life | Review
Love the One You’re With: Fukada Explores Love and Death as Unhappy Accidents
The instability of romance is the only real given in the intimate...
Plan 75 | Review
Aging Disgracefully: Hayakawa Questions Institutional & Internalized Ageism
If a septuagenarian falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it...
Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #24. Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?
How Do You Live?
In the end, The Wind Rises was not the film that would see Hayao Miyazaki hang up his brush. In production...
Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #35. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Kaibutsu
Kaibutsu
Broker filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has been in creative overdrive working on both a series (Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House) and what was an...
Gettin’ Gig Wit It: KimStim is Enceinte with Huang Ji/Ryuji Otsuka’s “Stonewalling”
Real-life partners and filmmakers Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsukahave been riding the autumn film festival wave of Venice (Giornate degli Autori), Toronto's TIFF and...
A Man (Aru Otoko) | 2022 Venice Film Festival Review
The Good Thief: Ishikawa Explores the Tenuous Reality of Identity
As its elemental title suggests, Kei Ishikawa’s fourth film, A Man, asserts we can only...
Forever a Woman: Six Films by Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective
One can’t dig too deep in Japan’s cinematic catalogue without confronting the talents of Kinuyo Tanaka. History has chosen to favor Tanaka’s career as...
Interview: Hirokazu Kore-eda (Air Doll)
Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to a thematic subject matter he knows well: loneliness and emptiness. This time out, he does so via the...
Air Doll | Review
There is No Substitute: Kore-eda Digs into Our Rubber Soul with Fantasy Flick
Reinterpreting the notion of what it is to truly be living and...breathing,...
Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2022: #69. Koji Fukada’s Love Life
Love Life
Just a couple of weeks back we saw Japan's Koji Fukada name attached to a market project going by the title of Love on...
Video Interview: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi – Drive My Car
Filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mesmerizing character studies (2015’s Happy Hour, 2018’s Asako I & II) often snag awards at major film festivals, and 2021 was...
Drive My Car | Review
Lamprey Love: The Play’s the Thing in Hamaguchi’s Brooding Saga of Regrets
“When one has no real life, one lives on illusions,” is one of...
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy | Review
Flesh+Fantasy: Hamaguchi Harvests Regrets in Eloquent Triptych
One of Japan’s most compelling and profound contemporary auteurs is Ryusuke Hamaguchi, a purveyor of the barely contained...
Wife of a Spy | Review
Spy Game: Kurosawa Finds Passion & Terror in History’s Gloom
One doesn’t tend to associate period melodrama or espionage with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a perennial genre...
True Mothers | Review
Mother Has Arrived: Kawase Returns with Intersecting Drama on Motherhood
Recently, Naomi Kawase, a staple amongst arthouse enthusiasts of Japanese cinema, has been drifting ever...
A Girl Missing | Review
Guilt by Dissociation: Fukada Explores the Burden of Others in Exemplary Melodrama
Director Kôji Fukada presents a melodrama hung on absurdity for his fourth feature,...
Skin is In: Ishii’s Signature Erotic Violence in Inferno of Torture (1969) | Blu-ray Review
An unsung eccentric of Japanese cinema is Teruo Ishii, referred to in his native country as ‘the King of Cult,’ whose forays into Ere...
We Are Little Zombies | Review
13 Stages of Grief: Nagahisa’s Game-Changing Debut
Makoto Nagahisa’s We Are Little Zombies is a pure and delightful work of art. Crafted with love and...
Criterion Collection: The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) | Blu-ray Review
For those accustomed to the bittersweet greatest hits of Japanese auteur Yasujirô Ozu’s later period familial dramas, the lesser known 1952 social satire The...
Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2019: #2. The Truth – Hirokazu Kore-eda
The Truth
Fresh off his 2018 Palme d’Or winning Shoplifters (review), prolific Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda continues his perennial output with his latest project, The Truth,...
Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2019: #27. To the Ends of the Earth – Kiyoshi Kurosawa
To the Ends of the Earth
Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa shows no signs of slowing, turning to Uzbekistan for his latest feature, To the Ends...
Criterion Collection: A Story from Chikamatsu | Blu-ray Review
Playing like the tortured precursor to Masahiro Shinoda’s similarly tragic tale of stymied romance with 1969’s Double Suicide is the great Kenji Mizoguchi’s late...
Shoplifters | Review
Ties That Bind: Koreeda Examines the Essence of Family from Unexpected Perspective
Anyone familiar with the cinema of Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda already knows what...
