Drama films
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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…
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Summer Wars review – Mamoru Hosoda’s birthday party anime puts the world at risk from AI baddie
This thriller-cum-family drama is a cut above genre anime with narrative complexity, bravura imagery and a met…
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Super Happy Forever review – glowing love story in reverse with echoes of Before Sunrise
In this beautifully acted film, a man returns to the Japanese seaside town where he met and fell in love with …
- 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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Cottontail review – life lessons are learnt in tender, Beatrix Potter-inspired tale
A Japanese man journeys to the Lake District to honour his late wife, testing his relationship with his son in…
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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…
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Remembering Every Night review – drifting drama follows three Tokyo women living their lives
Yui Kiyohara’s film of long shots and silences could be deeply boring or oddly fascinating depending on your p…
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‘Anger compels me forward’: Drive My Car composer Eiko Ishibashi on evil, experimentation and exploding genre
Her score for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s opus helped it to Oscar glory. Now the Japanese musician has reunited with i…
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‘My father buried his friends in minus-40 Siberia’: director Hirokazu Kore-eda on trauma and childhood
The maker of Shoplifters and I Wish talks about Monster, his dark new film about our dangerously fragmented wo…
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‘If God is in everything, that includes toilets’: Kōji Yakusho on cleaning high-art loos in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days
The star of Tampopo, Babel and The Eel reveals how it felt to share the screen with 17 stunning Tokyo lavatori…
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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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Small, Slow But Steady review – meditative boxing tale as deaf fighter rethinks life
Film follows Keiko, deaf since birth, making her way in the ring when Covid-19 lockdown arrives in Japan and s…
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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 …
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Plan 75 review – Japanese euthanasia drama grapples with tough questions
Japan’s over-75s are offered a painless death in exchange for a modest payment in Chie Hayakawa’s slow-burning…
- 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, 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…