Tag: Japan

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Normal
(2025)

Director – Ben Wheatley – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

Following the recent death of the town’s sheriff, an interim sheriff takes on the job at Normal, Minnesota – a town harbouring dark secrets related to Japanese yakuza – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 15th

Osaka, Japan. Three yakuza gang members who have failed to carry out a job properly must atone in front of their boss by cutting off their little finger. The two that do so are sent to the US on their next mission.

Normal, Minnesota. Following the recent death of old Sheriff Gunderson, Interim Sheriff Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk from Nobody, Ilya Naishuller, 2021; Better Call Saul, TV series, 2015-22) is getting to grips with his new job, driving around with Deputy Mike (Billy MacLellan from Nobody; Maudie, Aisling Walsh, 2016). Ulysses will be in the town for a mere eight weeks and his philosophy is, don’t upset anything and leave the place as you find it.

Normal may hold a few surprises for Ulysses. Such as the day he discovers a trail of red outside the door which turns out to have been caused by the local moose with a can of red paint dangling from one antler, of which he takes a photo.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ridley, Ripley,
Thelma & Louise

Alien

Director – Ridley Scott – 1979 – US – X – 116 mins 35 secs

*****

Blade Runner

Director – Ridley Scott – 1982 – US – AA – 117 mins 04 secs

*****

Thelma & Louise

Director – Ridley Scott – 1991 – US – 15 – 129 mins 22 secs

*****

Bumped back to the front of this website on the occasion of Film Tottenham’s screening of Thelma & Louise in their Action Woman season on Sunday, May 17th

At the end of Alien, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), having defeated the monster, strips down to her underwear only to discover that she hasn’t defeated it at all and it’s still in the space shuttle with her in the archetypal Hollywood false ending of recent years. It begged the question, why did Ripley remove her clothing at this point if not for the obvious gratification of the male members of the audience (and, one should add, the accompanying box office returns)?

At the end of Thelma & Louise, the eponymous heroines (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon respectively), on the run after the former’s rapist has been murdered after the event by the latter, find themselves trapped between the Grand Canyon’s gaping precipice on one side of them and massed hordes of police marksmen, ready to open fire if they don’t surrender, on the other.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Kokuho
(Kokuho,
国宝,
lit. National Treasure)

Director – Lee Sang-il – 2025 – Japan – Cert. – 175m

*****

The son of a murdered yakuza is taken under the wing of a respected kabuki actor, who trains him alongside his own son – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 8th

In kabuki theatre, an onnagata is a man who performs women’s roles, following the banning of women performing in kabuki by the shogunate, who feared it would result in moral decline, in the 17th century.

In 1964, as the snow falls outside, a large, new year restaurant meal for his yakuza family in Nagasaki turns into a pivotal event for teenager Kikuo Tachibana (Soya Kurokawa from Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023), for two reasons. One, he is able to perform as an onnagata in a kabuki play, The Snowbound Barrier, for visiting celebrity actor Hanai Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe from Fukushima 50, Setsuro Wakamatsu, 2020; Pokemon; Detective Pikachu, Rob Letterman, 2019; Inception, Christopher Nolan, 2010; Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006; Tampopo, Juzo Itami, 1985); two, a rival yakuza group bursts in and wipes out his family. He vows revenge, but fails in his attempt to murder the killer of his his father (Matsatoshi Nagase from The Box Man, Garyuku Ishii, 2024; Paterson, Jim Jarmusch, 2016; Sweet Bean, Naomi Kawase, 2015; Gojoe, Sogo Ishii, 2000; Cold Fever, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, 1994; The Most Terrible Time in My Life, Kaizo Hayashi, 1993; Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch, 1989).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
(Gojira -1.0,
ゴジラ -1.0)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – out on Netflix from Sunday, May 3rd 2026

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed. (Whether his guns would have had any effect in halting the creature’s advance is debatable. They probably wouldn’t have had any effect whatsoever.) The only other survivor, who had previously congratulated Koichi for a near impossible landing on a tiny runway, blames him for the multiple deaths because he didn’t pull the trigger.

In 1945, in the ruins of post-war Tokyo, Shikishima is accused by a survivor – a woman whose children have died – of being a disgrace.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Exit 8
(Hachiban Deguchi,
8番出口)

Director – Genki Kawamura – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

A commuter tries to leave the Tokyo Underground but finds himself retracing his steps within a repeating system from which there is no exit – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A packed carriage on the Tokyo Underground. A commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya from Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006), heading to his first day at a new job, can’t help but notice a young mother whose baby is crying. This is not a situation anyone likes to find themselves in, least of all the young mother. One male passenger takes it upon himself to berate and belittle the woman for selfishly allowing her child to make a noise in such a crowded, public space, inconveniencing everyone present. On one level, is he simply voicing what everyone else in the carriage is thinking? On another, is he completely out of order? After all, the mother is not the child making the noise, and she is doing her best to calm it. The irate passenger is clearly not helping the situation.

Perhaps someone should intervene and tell the man to leave the woman alone.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Akira
(アキラ)
4K
(IMAX)

Director – Katsuhiro Otomo – 1988 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

Manga artist turned director Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk classic returns to the big screen – back in over 350+ UK and Ireland cinemas, plus every IMAX screen from Friday, April 17th!

When Akira first appeared in the UK at the start of the nineties, Disney was busy reinventing the animated cartoon as a platform for the Broadway musical (Beauty And The Beast, Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise, 1991; The Lion King, Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers, 1994) and there were debates about whether comics (or ‘graphic novels’) could be created for adults as well as kids.

As so often in technology and media, Japan was ahead of the game. Otomo had published his long-running comic book or manga Akira in 1982 and turned it into a feature six years later, challenging widely held Western notions of what animation was. You could make SF in movies (Voyage To The Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902) and you could make serious SF (2001, Stanley Kubrick, 1968), but animation was strictly for kids, at least in the English-speaking mainstream, and that as what Disney did.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kinaesthesia

Director – Gerald Fox – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 97m

**1/2

A journey through the dream imagery of silent cinema and its cinematographic effects, augmented by present day stagings before the camera – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

Long fascinated by dream imagery in cinema, director Fox attended the Harvard course run by its Professor of Film Studies Vlada Petrić (1928-2019) to which this documentary essay is dedicated, being based on and quoting intensely from the latter’s theories.

Additionally, it just about works as a useful primer in silent cinema for the uninitiated provided you’re aware of its inherent biases and limitations. These may well be linked to the films (or film libraries) for which producer-director Fox secured rights, because there’s a far greater amount of French movies than you might expect. Or, these may may simply reflect Petrić’s theories and tastes.

Either way, the selection of movies here also leans towards the avant-garde in not only France but also the US. Then it throws in specific films from Griffifth (Edgar Allan Poe, 1909; The Avenging Conscience / Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1915) and Hitchcock (The Ring, 1927), China’s Romance of the Western Chamber (Hou Yau, 1927) and Japan’s A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Dongji Rescue
(Dong Ji Dao,
東吉 嶼)

Director – Fei Zhenxiang, Guan Hu – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 133m

The first hour and a half **1/2

The last half hour ****1/2

Chinese islanders under Japanese Occupation in WW2 set out to rescue a thousand plus British prisoners from a sinking, torpedoed ship – streaming on UK VoD from Friday, April 17th

An announcement in English on the BBC, from October 1st, 1942: “On September 27th 1942, the Japanese transport ship Lisbon Maru carrying 1,816 British prisoners of war departed Hong Kong for Japan. On October 1st, she was struck by a torpedo from American submarine USS Grouper and began to sink off the Eastern coast of China. Just two miles South West of the site lies a small island known to the Chinese as Dongji Island… This information comes overwhelmingly fast at the start, accompanied by CG images of the incident. Anyway, you get the drift.

And then, as if to suggest at least one of the directors’ true interests lie somewhere else altogether, there follow breathtaking images of an island, vast spaces with grasses blowing in the wind. And more verbal exposition: two young boys were rescued from the sea by Old Wu, but then the Northern islanders banished the boys to the Southern part of the island, believing them to have “pirate blood”.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Last Blossom
(Housenka,
ホウセンカ)

Director – Baku Kinoshita – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

A man lives with his wife and child… only they are not really his wife and child – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

Here’s a movie that breaks all the moulds. I could (and will) tell you several things about it, any of which would (and will) immediately spark preconceptions about what it is. And those preconceptions would (and will) be wrong.

If we start off with it as a drama about family life, which it arguably is, that doesn’t quite give you the full idea. This is a pretty strange family: it’s effectively a single parent mum Nana (voice: Hikari Mitsushima) and her baby son Kensuke who have been taken in by the kindly Minoru Akutsu (voice: Junki Tozuka) who wants to help them. Akutsu is in love with Nana, but he’s the quiet type and can’t bring himself to verbally express his love for her. (Which, I guess, makes this into a romantic drama of sorts. Certainly a tale of unrequited love, albeit an odd one.) And over the years, as the boy grows, the man comes to think of the boy as his own son.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Scarlet
(Hateshinaki Sukaretto,
果てしなきスカーレット,
lit. Endless Scarlet)

Director – Mamoru Hosoda – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 111m

****

Trapped in the Otherworld, a limbo preceding the afterlife, Princess Scarlet seeks revenge on her uncle who has killed her father the King – anime reimagining of Hamlet is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

Walking across a vast desert and dying of thirst, a redhead recalls how she came to be there. Those were happier times in sixteenth century Denmark, when Scarlet (voice: Mana Ashida from Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Keiichi Hara, 2022; The House of the Lost on the Cape, Shinya Kawatsura, 2021; Poupelle of Chimney Town, Yusuke Hirota, 2020; Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro, 2013) – for it is she – spent time with her father King Amleth (voice: Masachika Ichimura from Giovanni’s Island, 2014), drawing his portrait outdoors. Amleth always had the best interests of his people at heart.

Yet there was always a dark foreboding in the background – Scarlet’s severe mother Gertrude (voice: Yuki Saito from The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017) who ripped up her drawing, her power-hungry, warmongering Uncle Claudius (voice: Koji Yakusho from Perfect Days, Wim Wenders, 2023; Belle, Mamoru Hosoda, 2021, The Third Murder; Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997; Shall We Dance, Masayuki Suo, 1996) with his greedy eyes on the throne.… Read the rest