Tag: Jasper Sharp

January 29, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. As is customary, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, or Eiren, has just released figures for the previous year’s box office, presenting the opportunity to consider the current state of Japanese cinema as an industry, if not as an art. There is some cause for celebration on this first score, at […]

January 21, 2020 · 0 comments

Jo Shishido, who died yesterday in Tokyo, will be remembered as the charismatic moon-faced star of many a Nikkatsu Action film from the 1960s. He is best-known in the West for his iconic turn as the cold-hearted contract killer of Seijun Suzuki’s cult classic Branded to Kill (1967).

January 15, 2020 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. Almost fifty years ago, Donald Richie, the author and cultural critic who introduced Japanese cinema to the West, embarked on an epic odyssey of self-discovery amongst the island communities between Shikoku, Honshu and Kyushu, resulting in one of his most personal and highly-regarded books, The Inland Sea (1971). Two decades later, filmmaker […]

September 3, 2019 · 1 comment

By Jasper Sharp. It is a ballsy act for a company to put out a four-film box set of titles made almost half a century ago that have never had any form of home video release outside Japan, all made by a director whose name is unknown outside the rarefied circles of Japanese film specialism. […]

May 15, 2019 · 0 comments

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 […]