Search Results for: Jasper Sharp

April 30, 2024 · 0 comments

Although only the most recent three weeks of posts are visible on this blog’s front page, you can navigate through the previous nine years of articles using the tags. Click on these links to find our world-class obituaries and book reviews, or coverage of Japan and China. You can read the Hugo award-winning Jeannette Ng […]

March 29, 2024 · 0 comments

By Tom Wilmot. Unlikely as it might be, the late Yasuharu Hasebe is one of Japan’s best-represented filmmakers overseas, with several of the director’s works making their way west over the past twenty or so years. Radiance Films continues the trend of bringing Hasebe’s trademark action movies to Blu-ray with the release of his electrifying […]

September 29, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. Directed by the LA-born Michael Arias, and adapted from Taiyo Matsumoto’s cult manga of the same name, Tekkonkinkreet depicts the adventures of two young street urchins named Kuro and Shiro (“Black” and “White”) as they run riot around the aptly-named Takara-Machi (Treasure Town), leading a feral existence far removed from the other […]

June 1, 2023 · 1 comment

By Tom Wilmot. There’s a bomb on the Hikari 109! Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) and his band of blue-collar bombers attempt to extort money from the government, holding the lives of some 1,500 bullet train passengers to ransom. When the National Railway suggests stopping the train to check for an explosive, they learn that the […]

May 20, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Tom Mes’s new book begins in 2022 with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car winning an Oscar, followed by a flood of gushing articles about how it was going to “change Japanese cinema.” He notes that this relatively minor art-house film was never going to rock any boats in its native Japan, and […]