Tag: Japan

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

First Love
(Hatsukoi,
初恋)

Director – Takashi Miike – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 108m

*****

A boxer with no fear of death. Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads. A bag of drugs. A girl sold into prostitution. Miike orchestrates his potent cocktail with pace, panache and energy – cinemas Friday, February 14th, home video Monday, February 24th

And yet, as its release date implies, First Love is also a Valentine’s Day-friendly date movie. Not, admittedly, your average date, but Miike has never been your average director. High-profile titles released in the West like Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Yakuza Apocalypse give an certain idea of what he’s about – life, death and gangsters. This is only one facet of a career which also boasts samurai epics and a musical. If you count his made-for-video features of the early 1990s, Miike has now made over a hundred films. Many are highly entertaining and one or two, such as Audition, the sweet romantic film that turns into a terrifying horror thriller, might justifiably be termed great. First Love may not quite be Audition, but it’s arguably his best film for years… [Read more]

Full review at All The Anime.

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Relative Worlds
(Ashita Sekai
Ga Owaru
To Shitemo,
あした世界
が終わる
としても)

Director – Yuhei Sakuragi – 2019 – Japan – 93m

***

Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish boy meets girl tale and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are fast, full on and frantic – and indeed in places quite hard to keep up with. The dysfunctional families are more a background plot device than anything else. That said, if you’re prepared to get on its wavelength (or wavelengths, plural) it’s an enjoyable enough romp, with action that looks great on a big screen… [read more]

Full review at All The Anime.

Trailer:

Festivals

2019

Scotland Loves Anime

Annecy International Animation Festival

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shoplifters
(Manbiki Kazoku,
万引き家族)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2018 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 121m – Palme d’Or winner

*****

Sleight of hand. A family of small-time criminals takes a little girl into their care – now out on VoD

The nuclear family. Dad Osamu (Lily Franky) takes son Shota (Jyo Kairi) shoplifting at a local convenience store. Mum Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), a former sex worker, dispenses advice to her younger sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka). Grandma (Kirin Kiki) lives with the family, making a total of five persons in one small living space.

Father and son spot a little girl (Miyu Sasaki) sitting on the street. She’s hungry, so they take to theirs and give her a meal. Taking her home, it’s clear that neither father nor mother wants the child currently nor ever did. So the family decides to take Yuri in as its newest member.

Shota takes Yuri on a shoplifting trip but it doesn’t go so well… [Read the rest]

Out on Thunderbird Video. Also currently on Amazon Prime, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema (all rental). This review originally appeared in DMovies.org.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Foreboding
(Yocho,
予兆 散歩する侵略者)

Director – Kiyoshi Kurosawa – 2017 – Japan – 140m

*****

Loving the alien. Again. Japanese director reshapes his earlier Before We Vanish into an effective drama which plays out as an edge of the seat, sci-fi alien invasion thriller – from the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) 2018

This is not exactly a remake, not exactly a reboot, not exactly a sequel. Most definitely a companion piece, though, and arguably the more effective of the two movies. And apparently, an edit of the director’s five-part series for Japanese satellite station Wowow, although it feels like a (well over two hours long) standalone feature. Kiyoshi Kurosawa revisits Before We Vanish / Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha (2017) for another story about the aliens clad in human bodies who steal concepts from people’s minds by touching a finger to a forehead E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) style prior to a full scale invasion of Earth.

Where previously the director took the material and threw a cornucopia of different elements at it, this time round his efforts feel much more thought through and the resultant film far more consistent overall – a creepy and unsettling sci-fi paranoia thriller grounded in compelling, character-driven human drama.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Little Forest
(리틀 포레스트)

Director – Yim Soon-Rye – 2018 – South Korea – 103m

*****

This review originally appeared in DMovies.org.

The passing of the seasons. A young woman finds her true self in the Korean countryside in this adaptation of a Japanese manga; the outcome will make you drool, for more reasons than one – from the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) and the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.

The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Third Murder
(Sandome
No Satsujin,
三度目の殺人)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2017 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

For a director usually associated with family dramas like I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and After The Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder might seem like a change of direction. It begins with a murder, and focussed on a lawyer trying to uncover what actually happened, a narrative template familiar from countless films about journalists in search of a story, detectives trying to solve crimes and courtroom dramas of lawyers at work.

Yet there are plenty of Kore-eda concerns evident here. Ambitious young lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama from Like Father Like Son and John Woo’s thriller ManHunt) is a workaholic estranged from his wife. His daughter commits petty offences like shoplifting. His client Misumi (Koji Yakusho) was imprisoned for a murder over thirty years ago, but since his release has confessed to a second murder. He, too, has a daughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.

As for the murder victim, [Read the remainder of the review at All The Anime…]

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Wings Of Eagles

Serving the true God

Wings Of Eagles
Directed by Stephen Shin, Michael Parker
Certificate 12, 108 minutes
Released 12 March 2018

A sequel of sorts to Chariots of Fire, Wings Of Eagles tells the story of Eric Liddell’s missionary years in China. He’s played here by Joseph Fiennes, an actor who has grappled with one aspect or another of Christianity in several stories (Risen, The Handmaid’s Tale, Luther) and seems to thrive on roles like this. The film’s focus on British missionary work in China evokes The Inn of the Sixth Happiness about Gladys Aylward.

Liddell famously refused to run an Olympic race on Sunday, believing that no work should be done on the Lord’s Day. Later, he went to China with the London Missionary Society, taking his family with him, then sending them home after the Japanese invaded… [Read the rest]

Trailer:

Review originally published in Reform, March 2018.

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Funimation UK

The following reviews appeared on the Funimation UK blog in 2016.

Creepy (2016), Dark Water (2002), The Human Condition Trilogy (1959, 1959, 1961), Kubo And The Two Strings (2016), Ran (1985) and When Marnie Was There (2014).

More detailed links to all these plus full details of UK Certifications, running lengths and release dates can be found below.

Creepy (2016)
(Cert. 15, 130 mins, UK release 25/11/2016)

Dark Water (2002)
(Cert. 15, 101 mins,
UK BD/DVD release 14/10/2016)

The Human Condition Trilogy (1959, 1959, 1961)
(Cert. 15, 208 + 181 + 190 mins,
UK DVD release 19/09/2016)

Kubo And The Two Strings (2016)
(Cert. PG, 101 mins, UK release 09/09/2016)

Ran (1985)
(Cert. 15, 162 mins, UK re-release 01/04/2016)

When Marnie Was There (2014)
(Cert. PG, 130 mins, UK DVD release 03/10/2016) No block selected.

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Human Condition
Trilogy
(Ningen
No Joken,
人間の條件)

The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (Ningen No Joken: Dai 1 Hen, 人間の條件・第一・第二部)

Director – Masaki Kobayashi – 1959 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 208m

The Human Condition II: Road To Eternity (Ningen No Joken: Dai 2 Hen, 人間の條件・第三・第四部)

Director – Masaki Kobayashi – 1959 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 181m

The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer (Ningen No Joken: Kanketsu Hen, 人間の條件・完結篇)

Director – Masaki Kobayashi – 1961 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 190m

*****

The following review originally appeared in Funimation UK.

—

Jeremy Clarke on a live action Japanese classic.

The main reason Masaki Kobayashi’s extraordinary trilogy The Human Condition has been scarcely seen in the West is its daunting nine hours plus length. That’s no longer the case thanks to its UK release on DVD and Blu-ray.

The trilogy’s three constituent films released two in 1959 and one in 1961 clock in at over three hours apiece which makes it long by any standard. Ostensibly three films spread over three discs in the new release it is to all intents and purposes one very long movie helpfully broken into six numbered parts of roughly equal length. This big screen cinema release viewed on a home cinema platform today stands up well alongside many contemporary TV mini-series.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

When Marnie
Was There
(Omoide
No Mani,
思い出
のマーニー)

Director – Hiromasa Yonebayashi – 2014 – Japan – Cert. U – 103m

****

This second animated work by Ghibli / Arrietty director Yonebayashi is another adaptation of an English children’s author – now showing on Netflix (subtitled / dubbed) and can also be seen in the Anime season April / May 2022 at BFI Southbank (dubbed)

—

The following review originally appeared in Funimation UK.

—

Jeremy Clarke on Studio Ghibli’s latest and possibly last theatrical movie. Now showing on Netflix

Studio Ghibli’s star director Hayao Miyazaki has suggested When Marnie Was There may be its final production. That would be a great shame since the film confirms its director Hiromasa Yonebayashi as a rising talent.

Twelve year old Anna has low self-esteem, rarely interacts with others and is prone to asthma attacks. So Anna’s foster mother sends her to stay with Aunt and Uncle Oiwa in the country. Her uncle warns her to stay away from the supposedly haunted grain storage silo on the hill. The Oiwas put her up in their daughter’s long vacated bedroom.

When she opens the window an improvement is immediately visible in Anna as if the view of trees and a lake which greets her is making her aware she is breathing pure, fresh country air for the first time.… Read the rest