Category: Features

March 1, 2017 · 0 comments

By Roxy Simons. Ichie Minami (Miki Nakatani) doesn’t want anything to change. She’s determined to keep everything in her grandmother’s dress shop the way it was when the old lady was alive. The room looks the same, the clothes are all made from designs made years before, and she still uses the traditional pedal sewing […]

February 27, 2017 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Magic schools won’t go out of fashion in anime for a while yet. Harry Potter surely helped the proliferation of ‘magic school’ anime, and Absolute Duo tips its hat back towards England. One of its school’s main features is a massive clock tower that’s the spitting image of Big Ben, while the […]

February 26, 2017 · 1 comment

By Meghan Ellis. If you enjoy your breakfast with a side of restless dread, you should pick up a copy of the remastered Perfect Blue vinyl soundtrack. I say “breakfast” as that’s how my first listen went; a dark January morning over a bowl of New Year’s Resolution, with the film’s songs of madness accompanying […]

February 23, 2017 · 0 comments

By Roxy Simons. Bank teller Rika (Rie Miyazawa) leads a conventional life. She goes to work, meets clients about their accounts and possible future investments, and then goes home where she prepares food for her distracted husband. Frustrated with her humdrum existence, she succumbs to the seductions of a younger man. Finding happiness for the […]

February 22, 2017 · 1 comment

The legendary director Seijun Suzuki, who died on 13th February, is best known in the West for such quirky, idiosyncratic works as Youth of the Beast, Kanto Wanderer and Tokyo Drifter. These 1960s B-movie genre pictures playfully riffed on the “borderless action” mash-ups of gangster films, youth movies, musicals and westerns fostered by the Nikkatsu […]