Cinema 123
Of Flesh and Blood
By Jeremy Clarke. In the West, Hirokazu Koreeda remains Japan’s highest-profile, living, live-action film director. Shoplifters (2018) picked up over eighty awards nominations this year including the Best Foreign-Language Picture Golden Globe and Oscar. A Blu-ray box set of four key films, each with a new commentary, plus some excellent extras and a useful book […]
Inuyashiki
By Roxy Simons. Ichiro Inuyashiki has it tough; he has no friends, he’s shamed publicly at work on a regular basis, and even his family despise him. His only source of solace is a stray dog named Hanako, but, despite how the world treats him, this middle-aged loser still wants to be a good person. So, […]
Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High
By Roxy Simons. Teiichi (Masaki Suda) wants to create his own empire. How’s that possible? By controlling the student council of Kaitei Supreme High School, of course. If he could run the school then Teiichi would become a shoe-in for a prestigious government position, and from there he could even become Prime Minister. With his father’s […]
Mirai
By Andrew Osmond. Mamoru Hosoda’s Oscar-nominated film Mirai is a time-travel fantasy that might look like Hosoda’s own journey into his past. After all, his breakout film was another time-travel yarn. But whereas 2006’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time featured a familiar kind of anime protagonist – a mishap-prone schoolgirl with some confused feelings […]
Books: On Kurosawa
By Jasper Sharp. The robustly-designed and impressively laid-out new tome On Kurosawa: A Tribute to the Master Director by Peter Tasker inevitably prompts the same questions I raised a year ago in my review of Paul Anderer’s Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Does the world really need another book on this director, and what exactly is it about […]