Japan

Sunny

Nothing triggers a reunion faster than a debilitating illness, and once crowded around a fading loved one’s death bed, what better to do than indulge in nostalgic flashbacks to simpler… Read More
Ten Years Japan

Part of the Ten Years International Project, born of the success of the controversial Hong Kong film from 2015, Ten Years Japan presents five distinct visions of the country a… Read More
Cafe Funiculi Funicula

Cafe Funiculi Funicula employs a fantastical time-travel premise to teach its characters how to seize the moment and let go of their regrets. Inevitably less interested in science fiction than… Read More
One Cut of the Dead

We’ve probably all seen enough zombies and “films within films” to last a dozen lifetimes, yet Shinichiro Ueda’s innovative horror comedy proves there is still nourishment to be sucked from… Read More
Killing

A young masterless samurai faces a crisis of confidence when he is called upon to defend a family of farmers from a marauding gang in Shinya Tsukamoto’s small scale samurai… Read More
When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead

Inspired by a real-life online query that went viral in Japan and spawned a song and bestselling manga, When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to be Dead is… Read More
Sakura Guardian in the North

Veteran Japanese actress Sayuri Yoshinaga completes her thematically connected “Northern Trilogy” with a sweeping and at times experimental melodrama in which an ageing war widow wrestles with senility and reconnects… Read More
The Lowlife

Adapted from a novel by Japanese porn star Mana Sakura, ironically titled The Lowlife unfolds over a single weekend and follows a trio of women through their experiences in Tokyo’s… Read More
What a Wonderful Family! 3: My Wife, My Life

Gender roles within the Hirata household are the subject of the third instalment in Yoji Yamada’s surprisingly durable family comedy series. What a Wonderful Family! 3: My Wife, My Life… Read More
Shoplifters

Winner of the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Shoplifters sees Hirokazu Koreeda pool his favourite themes into a heartbreaking drama that ranks among his very best. The… Read More
Colors of Wind

A twisting, tragic romance involving magicians and their doppelgängers, Colors of Wind appears, on paper at least, to suggest a Japanese reimagining of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. Allusions are also… Read More
Last Winter, We Parted

Fuminori Nakamura’s 2014 novel Last Winter, We Parted was a big hit in Japan. It was hailed as the author’s greatest work, but was also deemed unfilmable because of its… Read More
50 First Kisses

A womanising tour guide working in Hawaii falls for a beautiful woman with short-term memory loss, meaning he must begin his seduction afresh every day in Yuichi Fukuda’s fluffy romcom… Read More
Before We Vanish

One of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best-loved films remains Pulse (2001), his paranoid nightmare about the horrors of the internet and the breakdown of human interaction. News that the Japanese director has… Read More
The Limit of Sleeping Beauty

Japan has one of the world’s most prolific independent film scenes, one where soft-core pornography and eccentric auteurism regularly go hand in hand. The Limit of Sleeping Beauty falls squarely… Read More
Birds Without Names

Love is the root of all evil – or so you might surmise from Birds Without Names. In the latest film by Kazuya Shiraishi (Dawn of the Felines), Yu Aoi… Read More
The Crimes that Bind

The discovery of a woman’s body in an abandoned flat presents police detective Kyoichiro Kaga (Hiroshi Abe) with his most personal case yet, in this latest mystery from bestselling author… Read More
Outrage Coda

Takeshi Kitano caps his yakuza comeback trilogy in fine style with a typically convoluted tale of shifting loyalties and underhand power plays within Osaka’s Hanabishi-kai crime syndicate. Honing in once… Read More