Features 738
Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll
By Andrew Osmond. The Kyoto Animation TV series Violet Evergarden was broadcast in Japan in 2017, and was released internationally on Netflix the next year. This film sequel, subtitled Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll, has a very sad distinction. It was Kyoto Animation’s last work to be completed before the murderous arson attack on […]
Calamity of a Zombie Girl
By Andrew Osmond. Calamity of a Zombie Girl is a horror film. If we’re being more precise, it’s a schlocky horror picture show, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It’s a film in which college-age students investigate an occult mystery, uncover something they shouldn’t, and then start dying messily. There will be blood. Heads will be […]
First Love
by Jeremy Clarke. A boxer with no fear of death. Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads. A bag of drugs. A girl sold into prostitution. Director Takeshi Miike’s latest is a potent cocktail of these ingredients, a mass of mayhem orchestrated with his trademark pace, panache and energy. And yet, as its 14th February UK release date […]
Millennium Actress
By Jasper Sharp. Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress uses its heroine to explore themes of subjectivity and spectatorship, with a topic that might at first seem better suited to live action. In all those elements, it bears some similarities with his debut feature Perfect Blue (1997), which pitched the viewer into the fragmenting worldview of a retired […]
King’s Game
By Andrew Osmond. King’s Game is a horror anime. More specifically, it’s a teen-horror anime, in which school-age characters are terrorised by a mysterious killer, called “King.” This self-styled royal murderer doesn’t need a mask or a knife. He (or she or it) speaks through a medium hardwired into the minds of millennials, the mobile […]