Category: Features

June 10, 2022 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. Following on from Arrow’s superb BD of Sogo Ishii’s Burst City (1982) comes Third Window’s equally impressive BD release of its predecessor in the Ishii canon Crazy Thunder Road (1980). This was his Nihon University student graduation project, his first to be shot on 16mm rather than Super 8, which somehow got […]

June 7, 2022 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. For anyone who needs reminding who is Lupin the Third, he’s a super-thief, a lanky, loony criminal showman, forever off on adventures involving fast cars, lovely women and crazy stunts. He’s accompanied by a mobster gunman (Jigen) and an old-school samurai (Goemon); he’s frantically pursued by a monomaniac cop, Zenigata; and he’s often tracked […]

June 4, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Despite the assumptions encouraged by the title, Emma: A Victorian Romance is very much not based on Jane Austen’s Emma. However, its literary ancestors are manifold and those with familiarity with Victorian novels would find themselves passingly busy noting the connections. Emma overhears a whispered discussion about a scandalous yet delicious novel […]

May 29, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the boggling weirdness of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, that animated oddity in which the child-hero from Japanese school textbooks is reimagined as a patriotic general, leading animal marines in an assault on foreign devils. But its not just the premise of Sacred Sailors that […]

May 26, 2022 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. When the Barbican and the Royal Shakespeare Company announced the stage adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, with a new orchestration of Joe Hisaishi’s iconic score by Will Stuart and a hand-drawn title by Toshio Suzuki, it was obviously an iconic event in the annals of British theatre. What nobody could have predicted […]