Just when it seemed that there were no more action roles for Tom Cruise to take, Oblivion appears. Directed by TRON: Legacy’s Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion was the first major Sci-Fi release of 2013 and, with a budget of over $120 million, promised to be one of the year’s biggest. In... Read More »
Writer-director-producer Kobayashi Masahiro’s black-and-white Japan’s Tragedy is a quiet elegy of a film. It is stunning and moving in its sustained emotion of the (de)composition of a family examined in reverse chronology, set in Tokyo 2011. The opening scene has the camera sign... Read More »
A hit-and-run connects a group of men in the aftermath of a woman’s death. Kijima (Yamada Takayuki), the driver and perpetrator of the accident, is imprisoned and released five years later; Nakamura (Sakai Masato), lives life as if dead to the world as a way to handle his grief o... Read More »
There Is Light starts out as what would presumably be a kinky comedy about a young woman, Saori, on her first day at work for the agency Honey Lips. Honey Lips is a company that provides sexual services to disabled men, a task that for Saori seems like an easy deal. As the film c... Read More »
With only her second feature film, veteran television screenwriter Kitagawa Eriko takes up the mantle of sensitive and playful dramas for which Iwai Shunji was known in the late 1990s and first half of the 2000s, though without the element of youth. If you can get past the superf... Read More »
Screenwriter Inoue Junichi’s debut feature is a minimalist work on the sexual violence of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) through three characters, set in Tokyo towards the end of the war: Ohira (Murakami Jun), a soldier who returns from the war having lost his right arm and bec... Read More »
The Kirishima Thing is based on the young feted novelist Asai Ryo’s work of the same title, written while still a university student. The literary work presents the perspectives of multiple characters around the popular high school student named Kirishima. The multiple perspectiv... Read More »
If Rurouni Kenshin was considered a hit, ending up in the top 20 highest-grossing films of last year, then Thermæ Romæ was a veritable bonanza as the second highest-grossing film of the year. The film is directed by Takeuchi Hideki and based on Yamazaki Mari’s 2007 manga of the s... Read More »
If people fault Miike Takashi for making only studio films nowadays, they should at least be thankful that in Miike one has a most proficient director, whatever the story may be. Watching the 2012 Japanese box-office hit Rurouni Kenshin, the live action adaptation of the very pop... Read More »
For her sophomore effort Helter Skelter, photographer-filmmaker Ninagawa Mika adapted Okazaki Kyoko’s 2003 manga of the same title. Those who have seen Masumura Yasuzo’s biting comedy Giants and Toys (1958) and its representation of the Japanese media industry’s quick manufacture... Read More »
Like the apt pairing of Okita Shuichi and Yoshida Shuichi for the former’s film adaptation of the latter’s work to come up with A Story of Yonosuke, so it is fitting that it is Miki Satoshi who has adapted Hoshino Tomoyuki’s 2010 novel of the same name. As its title suggests, It’... Read More »
When the Ichizawas’ restaurant burns down and married couple Satoko (Matsu Takako) and Kanya (Abe Sadao) must contend with the reality of having to scrape back all of the money they had built up and now lost in the fire, one thinks that the film will be about the test of their ma... Read More »
