Jeremy Clarke 33
Ring Collection
by Jeremy Clarke. You watch a short, scary video on the VCR. Then your phone starts to ring… you have a week to show the video to someone else – or die! That’s the premise of Ring (1998), the horror film which took first Japan, then the world, by storm. It’s also the key title […]
Mifune: The Last Samurai
by Jeremy Clarke. Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) is director Akira Kurosawa’s iconic star of his samurai movies Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. He’s the subject of three time Oscar-nominated documentary film maker Steven Okazaki’s useful documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015). As narrator Keanu Reeves says in voice-over, without Mifune there would have been no Magnificent […]
Before We Vanish
by Jeremy Clarke. Part relationship drama, part love story, part comedy, part science fiction, Before We Vanish is the latest movie by Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa to hit UK Blu-ray and may be his strangest ever film. This is saying a lot for a director whose filmography includes horror movies like Pulse (2001), ghost stories […]
Early Korean Cinema
by Jeremy Clarke. This month, BFI Southbank and the Korean Cultural Centre UK are mounting a season of films from Korea made up to and including 1946 under the moniker Early Korean Cinema: Lost Films From The Japanese Occupation Period. The season is curated by KCCUK’s Hyun Jin Cho and University of Sheffield’s Kate Taylor-Jones.
Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji
by Jeremy Clarke. Despite the bloody implications of its title, Bloody Spear At Mount Fuji (1955) is more like a period road movie, introducing a series of offbeat characters, each in their own unique situation. Whilst Mount Fuji puts in an appearance in the opening frame and in one of the many scenarios on the […]