Cinema 158
Tsukamoto: Three Films
by Jeremy Clarke. Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest feature, the samurai movie Killing comes to UK Blu-ray in a two-disc edition, along with two fascinating shorts: the Super-8 epic The Adventure of Denchu Kozo and the later masterpiece Haze. All three feature informative audio commentaries by Tom Mes, author of Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto […]
Books: Kore-eda’s Elemental Cinema
By Jasper Sharp. Ask anyone about the state of contemporary Japanese cinema and the one name that is sure to come up is that of the subject of Linda Ehrlich’s The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema, surprisingly the first book-length focus on the director. For well over two decades, Kore-eda has enjoyed widespread […]
Books: Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary
By Jonathan Clements. Donna Kornhaber’s new book on animation and war begins with an electrifying account of an afternoon in 1899, when the Ladies Welfare Committee for Soldiers and Sailors staged the premiere of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper’s one-minute “Matches Appeal.” The Empire, in Leicester Square, was the venue at which the world’s first recorded screening of […]
Books: Cinema is a Cat
By Jasper Sharp. Cinema is a Cat: A Cat-Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies, as its subtitle highlights, is less a scholarly survey of cats in the movies than a cat-led guide as to how to conduct cinematic analysis. Yes, you read that right. This is a book that casts a curious cat’s eye across a […]
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 […]