Category: Features

June 4, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Liz and the Blue Bird was released in Japan in April 2018, less than two years after A Silent Voice. It was an ideal film for uniting two sets of viewers; those who’d become aware of Naoko Yamada through A Silent Voice, and those who loved the series she’d been involved with […]

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 29, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. The name Summer Ghost may sound oxymoronic to British viewers. We tend to associate ghosts with cold, dark months, as with A Christmas Carol and the BBC’s tradition of putting up scary spook stories over Christmas. Actually, Summer Ghost isn’t a frightening film as such, though it deals with fears, intense emotions […]

May 23, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “The history of manga,” notes the back-cover blurb for Matthieu Pinon and Laurent Lefebvre’s new book, “is inextricably tied to Japan’s social, economic, political, and cultural evolution.” But the authors neglect to mention the real selling point, which is that their History of Modern Manga actually bothers to point out where those […]

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 […]