Japan
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In his previous film 100 Yen Love , Masaharu Take charted the unlikely transformation of a reclusive female slob (played by Sakura Ando) into a bona fide boxing contender with… Read More
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The life and career of Japanese composer and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto are explored in this new documentary from Stephen Nomura Schible. Best known for scoring – and starring in –… Read More
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There was probably a time when this awkward high-school romance would have been considered acceptable fare. But in a social climate awash with scandal, where US state senate candidates and… Read More
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Takeru Satoh (the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy) plays an immortal being in director Katsuyuki Motohiro’s live-action adaptation of Gamon Sakurai’s manga. As with many of these properties, Ajin: Demi-Human has already… Read More
