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Rental Family review – Brendan Fraser seeks meaning in pointless Japanese role-play drama
Fraser plays a hapless Tokyo-based actor working for a firm that offers bespoke therapeutic role-play services…
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Escape review – notorious Japanese revolutionary tells story of country’s most wanted criminal
Director Masao Adachi – formerly of the Japanese Red Army – on the infamous Satoshi Kirishima, who went on the…
- Teen movies, Japan, Drama films, Science fiction and fantasy films, World news, Asia Pacific, Culture, Film
Happyend review – Orwellian Japanese high-school drama is brilliantly dystopian
Teen romance and paranoid surveillance collide to dysfunctional effect in Neo Sora’s beguiling debut future se…
- Japan, Technology, Drama films, Crime films, World news, Asia Pacific, Internet, Culture, Film, Thrillers
Cloud review – bizarre internet action thriller descends into hail of bullets
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s baffling crime farrago follows a cyber fraudster pursued by an angry gang of disappointed s…
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Stray Dog/High and Low review – Kurosawa lifts crime drama to astonishing new peaks
★★★★★/★★★★★Drawing on hardboiled US fiction, as American film had fed on his own Seven Samurai, the director b…
- Japan, Reality TV, World news, Documentary films, Asia Pacific, Television & radio, Television, Culture, Film
The Contestant review – the cruelty of reality TV on show in one of its earliest manifestations
Tomoaki Hamatsu was a sensation over the year he stayed alone in a single room amusing the camera, but this do…
- Japan, Society, Rape and sexual assault, Law, World news, Documentary films, Asia Pacific, Culture, Film
Black Box Diaries review – inside the remarkable events that triggered Japan’s #MeToo movement
Japanese journalist Shiori Itō tells how she pursued her rape case against a prominent TV executive This is th…
- Malala Yousafzai, Fukushima, Japan, Marine life, World news, Documentary films, Asia Pacific, South Korea, Culture, Film
The Last of the Sea Women review – female Korean divers as picturesque eco-feminist tradition
Sue Kim’s film about South Korea’s underwater fishers has everything from nuclear pollution to sexism to cover…
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Lumberjack the Monster review – an explosion of horror strangeness from a master of the art
Takashi Miike’s operatically over-the-top new film concerns a serial killer but who needs a plot with all this…
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Tokyo Story review – Yasujiro Ozu’s exquisite family tale stands the test of time
An elderly couple visit their grownup children in this stunning work of art from 1953, now re-released for its…
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Perfect Days review – Wim Wenders explores a quiet life in Tokyo
Bittersweet tale of an apparently contented toilet cleaner has an ambient urban charm, but feels a little too …
- Japan, World cinema, Cannes film festival, Drama films, World news, Asia Pacific, Cannes 2023, Festivals, Culture, Film
Monster review – Hirokazu Kore-eda’s hydra of modern morals and manners
Japanese director Kore-eda offers a deliberately dense but ultimately hopeful examination of how to negotiate …
- Japan, World cinema, Drama films, Society, Law, Assisted dying, Death and dying, World news, Asia Pacific, Culture, Film
Plan 75 review – life is terminated at 75 in melancholy anti-euthanasia drama
To combat an ageing population, a future Japan passes a law to pay older citizens to sign up for an easeful de…
- Japan, Drama films, Haruki Murakami, World news, Asia Pacific, Books, Culture, Animation in film, Film, Film adaptations
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman review – Murakami’s surreal tales around a Tokyo earthquake
The seductively quirky sad-serious tone of the author is evident as a constellation of characters try and save…
- Japan, Science fiction and fantasy films, World news, Asia Pacific, Anime, Festivals, Comedy films, Culture, Animation in film, Comedy, Berlin film festival, Berlin film festival 2023, Film
Suzume review – Makoto Shinkai’s charming modern Alice in Wonderland
The Your Name director’s mythic and comic new animation is an absorbing, intriguing and bewildering workHere i…
- Japan, World cinema, Science fiction and fantasy films, World news, Asia Pacific, Anime, Culture, Animation in film, Film
Eternal 831 review – anime thriller stops all the clocks with a superpower
In Kenji Kamiyama’s drama, a boy discovers that he can halt time when emotionally stirred and that terrorists …
- Japan, Venice film festival, World cinema, Drama films, World news, Asia Pacific, Festivals, Culture, Venice film festival 2022, Film
Love Life review – tangled and tragic human drama about chaotic life twists
Venice film festival: Japanese director Kôji Fukada has crafted a richly painful and quietly comic human drama…
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Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle review – Japanese soldier’s never-ending war
Robust, old-fashioned anti-war epic tells the true story of the soldier posted to the Philippines in the secon…
- Japan, World cinema, Drama films, World news, Asia Pacific, Festivals, Berlin film festival 2021, Culture, Berlin film festival, Film
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy review – a triptych of light-touch philosophy
Ryusuke Hamaguchi brings a gentle warmth to this ingenious collection of three stories united by themes of fat…
- Japan, Technology, Drama films, Virtual reality, World news, Asia Pacific, Anime, Romance films, Culture, Animation in film, Film
Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle
This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful …