Tag: cinema

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 […]

May 11, 2023 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. Chie Hayakawa‘s dystopian drama Plan 75 examines some of the social fallout of a government policy whereby Japanese people can voluntarily have themselves terminated after age 75.

May 8, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “I’m sure lots of us are struggling right now. But even so, let’s unite our efforts and give it our best shot!” These words are put into the mouth of one of the minor characters of Shinya Kawatsura’s The House of the Lost on the Cape but resonate through the years, from […]

April 8, 2023 · 1 comment

By Andrew Osmond. Makoto Shinkai has made anime since the 1990s, but his three latest features – Your Name, Weathering with You and now Suzume – form their own little sequence. Thematically, they’re about natural disasters. Tonally, they have a crowd-pleasing blend of spectacle, heartbreak and humour. Their comedy especially marks them off from Shinkai’s […]

March 27, 2023 · 0 comments

by Jeremy Clarke. This animated feature based on six Haruki Murakami short stories comes not, as you might expect, from Japan, but rather from one of the few other countries that can reasonably be said to have an animation industry: France. Writer-director Pierre Földes, whose father Peter is an award-winning animator, further confounds expectations by […]