Japan
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More Than Blue, the Taiwanese remake of the 2009 South Korean tear-jerker, is sending audiences reaching for the Kleenex once again. It stars Jasper Liu Yi-hao as a young man… Read More
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A young man crippled by debt learns the obvious lesson that money can’t buy happiness in Keishi Ohtomo’s laborious cautionary tale. Adapted by Genki Kawamura from his own novel, Million… Read More
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Daisuke Miura is no stranger to Japan’s prolific soft core pornographic film industry. In 2014, the writer-director adapted his own play Love’s Whirlpool into a critically acclaimed film about lonely… Read More
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Many people have experienced that pang of inexplicable guilt upon recognising something in a current partner that reminds one of a former flame. Often it underscores nothing more than our… Read More
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 James Marsh film review archive 