Tag: cinema

October 11, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Released twenty-eight years ago, Macross Plus: The Movie still dazzles now, a film that somehow manages to combine plane dogfights and space duels (think Star Wars meets Top Gun); a melancholy drama about former friends tormented by their ruined past; and an AI pop-goddess who seems far less fantastical in the age […]

October 5, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Dolls, dogs, gods, children and their relationships with neurotically self-conscious humanity come under philosophical investigation in Mamoru Oshii’s sequel to his film, Ghost in the Shell. Rendered in a blend of drawn and computer animation, the sequel’s first half looks like a sleekly beautiful variant on the future-noir aesthetic of Blade Runner, […]

September 26, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. There’s something weird about the Hokkyoku Department Store – all the customers are animals. There’s an owl who can’t find a something to placate his wife; there’s a wolf in search of a proposal gift to win another wolf’s heart; there’s a sea mink that just can’t find the right present for […]

July 28, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. Here’s a funny thing; there aren’t many out-and-out anime comedy films. Of course, there are plenty that have comedy – some of anime’s best comic characters are from films, like the indomitable trans heroine Hana in Tokyo Godfathers and the clingy BFF Tomohiro in A Silent Voice. But these films aren’t comedies; […]

June 28, 2023 · 0 comments

The late Kinji Fukasaku is most fondly remembered for his hold-no-bars yakuza flicks, characterised by their hard-as-nails anti-heroes and brutal action. However, in the late 1970s, the director began to expand his cinematic palette, first by dipping into the jidaigeki genre with Shogun’s Samurai (1978). Also known as The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy, the film starred semi-frequent Fukasaku collaborator Shinichi […]