High school senior Itsumi Shiraishi (Marie Iitoyo) falls to her death from a building at the exclusive Seibo Maria Girls High School. She was the school administrator’s daughter and the President of the school’s prestigious literary club. Now, in the … Continue reading REVIEW: The Dark Maidens (2017)
Sunada (Kaho) is a director of television commercials – just past thirty-years-old, drinking a little too much, and hiding an unenthused lover from a happy but sexless husband. Once the pressures of a sexist industry and celebrity egos grow too … Continue reading REVIEW: Blue Hour (2019)
Kosuke Nakahama’s feature directing debut B|B is a short, strange, and utterly vivid concoction, one that rockets along for 77 minutes with a pace akin to getting strafed with machine gun fire. It is Nakahama’s graduate film project, and that shows through … Continue reading REVIEW: B|B (2020)
Nobuko (Meiko Takamine) arrives at her new job, teaching at an exclusive girl’s academy in Tokyo. Once there she finds herself mocked for her rural accent, and criticised for staying with her aunt (Chōko Iida) who runs a geisha house. … Continue reading REVIEW: Nobuko (1940)
Reiko (Hideko Takamine) married into the Morita family as a 19 year-old during the war, with her husband killed in action shortly afterwards. While American bombs destroyed the Morita store, and the family fled for safety, Reiko alone remained behind … Continue reading REVIEW: Yearning (1964)
Hiroki Tachibana (Tetsuji Tamayama) was a popular nature photographer with a successful television series, but the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy caused the end of his career. Years later, a request from his mother to photograph her friend triggers in … Continue reading REVIEW: Once Hit the Bottom (2022)
On the island of Shishikari, the local economy has been floundering due to an ageing population. Its one hope is farmer Keita Izumi (Tatsuya Fujiwara), whose popular black figs have placed the island in line for a five billion yen … Continue reading REVIEW: Noise (2022)
There are essentially four hugely influential and significant directors from Japanese cinema’s first half-century: Mikio Naruse, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Both Kurosawa and Ozu are easily the best known internationally; Naruse and Mizoguchi less so. Let’s focus … Continue reading “I, Yang Yuhuan, am not a Puppet” | The Empress Yang Kwei-Fei (1955)
What would you do if, while sorting through your late father’s possessions in the family home, stumbled upon a decades-old tape recording of yourself – just a small child – that incriminated you in a major unsolved crime? What would … Continue reading REVIEW: The Voice of Sin (2020)
During the day Ai (Tomona Hirota) works as a mascot on the streets of Osaka. At night, she supplements her income performing sex acts online. After a one-night stand she discovers her entire encounter has been recorded and uploaded to … Continue reading REVIEW: Videophobia (2019)
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