Tag: Japan

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Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music Shorts Top Ten

Top Ten Movies
(and more,
excluding re-releases)
2025

Work in progress – subject to change. Because I am still watching movies released in 2025, so it’s always possible that a new title could usurp the number one in due course.

All numbered films received either a theatrical, online or home media release in the UK between 01/01/25 and 31/12/25.

This version excludes re-releases (Battleship Potemkin, The Piano Teacher or Hard Boiled, among others) would top everything here). In addition to re-releases, this version also excludes films seen in festivals which haven’t had any other UK release in 2025. For that even longer list, click here.

Finally, last year’s list is here.

Top Ten Movies (and more) 2025

Please click on titles to see reviews.

The numbering will mostly be added later when I’ve watched more of the outstanding 2024 titles, and they have stopped moving around. So, currently, positions in this list should be taken with a pinch of salt.

*****

1=. Flow (2024, Belgium, France, Latvia)

1=. The Glassworker (2024, Pakistan, Spain)

1=. One Battle After Another (2025, US)

1=. Riefenstahl (2024, Germany)

1=. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024, Iran, Germany, France)

6=. Mars Express (2023, France)

6=. On Swift Horses (2024, US)

6=. … Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music Shorts Top Ten

Top Ten Movies
(and more)
2025

Work in progress – subject to change. Because I am still watching movies released in 2025, so it’s always possible that a new title could usurp the number one in due course.

All numbered films received either a theatrical, online or home media release in the UK between 01/01/25 and 31/12/25.

This version includes re-releases, but those aren’t numbered. It’s hard to imagine movies improving on Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Haneke’s The Piano Teacher or Woo’s Hard Boiled.

In addition to re-releases, this version also includes films seen in festivals which haven’t had any wider UK release in 2025.

Finally, last year’s list is here.

Top Ten Movies (and more) 2025

Please click on titles to see reviews.

The numbering will mostly be added later when I’ve watched more of the outstanding 2024 titles, and they have stopped moving around. So, currently, positions in this list should be taken with a pinch of salt.

*****

Babe (1995, Australia – reissue)

Battleship Potemkin / Music by Pet Shop Boys (1925, USSR – reissue, new score)

Brief Encounter (1945, UK – reissue; also in Film Tottenham’s BFI / Love & Obsession programme)

A Clockwork Orange (1971, US, UK – in Film Tottenham’s Cinema for All / 100 Years of Community Cinema programme)

The Devil’s Backbone (2001, Mexico, Spain – reissue)

Dogtooth (2009, Greece – reissue)

1=. … Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

YMCA Baseball Team
(YMCA Yagudan,
YMCA야구단)

Director – Kim Hyun-seok – 2002 – South Korea – Cert. – 104m

***

In 1905, as the Japanese take over the running of their country, a small group of Koreans form a baseball team to defeat the Japanese – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runsin cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

A lightweight sports comedy loosely inspired by historical events, this is set in 1905, by which time the Japanese were moving to occupy Korea. Lee Ho-chang (Song Kang-ho) is playing soccer on a local plateau when the ball goes off the edge and into the local YMCA missionary compound below. While retrieving the ball, he is confronted by US-schooled baseball enthusiast Min Jung-rim (Kim Hye-soo).

Much comedy is derived (albeit not that successfully for Western audiences) from Ho-chang’s taking a romantic liking to her, even though she has not the slightest interest in him, preferring (when he turns up later in the narrative) Japanese-schooled Oh Day-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) who is already highly skilled at baseball, which arrived in Japan in 1872, some 30 years before it came to Korea. Also in the team is bespectacled Ryu Kwang-tae (Hwang Jung-min), whose bureaucrat father is collaborating with the Japanese administration.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Alone in the Night
(Yoru ga Mata Kuru,
夜がまた来る)

Director – Takashi Ishii – 1994 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 108m

****1/2

After her undercover cop husband is killed by a gang, Nami infiltrates the gang and suffers much abuse as she attempts to identify and take her revenge on his killer – out on Blu-ray as part of the Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami limited edition digipack set (2000 copies) 

A compelling yet initially indecipherable image is slowly revealed, as we pull out, to be a pink marker pen colouring the handle of a black pistol in the hands of a girl wearing the pyjama top of the man against the side of whose bed she is sitting. He, it turns out, is Mitsuru (Toshiyuki Nagashima from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, Miyagawa, 2002; Godzilla vs. Biollante, Seiichi Yamamoto, 1989; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader, 1985), an undercover cop; she is Nami (Yui Natsukawa from I Wish, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011; Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008; Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Takeshi Kitano, 2003), and she’s fed up with his lack of contact while he’s on the job. As they embrace, she pleads with him, “Don’t do it!… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

The Glassworker
(Sheesha Gar,
شیشہ گ)

Director – Usman Riaz – 2024 – Pakistan, Spain – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

The son of a pacifist glassblower learning his father’s trade falls for the violin-playing daughter of an army colonel in wartime – complex, anti-war drama from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Contrechamps section, released in Pakistan on Friday, 26th July 2024 and out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

If you knew nothing about this animated film beforehand, you’d assume it to be Japanese. Love it or hate it, most animation made in Japan falls within very distinctive, stylistic, visual parameters. According to the press blurb, director Riaz is an admirer of Studio Ghibli directors Miyazaki and Takahata as well as more recent directors Mamoru Hosoda and Satoshi Kon. Visually, the film feels more like a Miyazaki than anything else, and of comparable quality too. Yet it’s also highly original, and Riaz, here directing his first feature after a number of shorts, clearly has his own voice.

It opens with a frame story about youthful glassblower Vincent Oliver (voice: Sacha Dhawan) who, with the help of his father, is preparing for the opening of his debut glassware exhibition. He rereads a letter from a girl which his father (voice: Art Malik) had told him years ago to destroy in their workshop’s furnace.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Happyend
(HAPPYEND) 

Director – Neo Sora – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 113m

***

Two schoolboys play a prank on their despotic principal, who turns it into an excuse to introduce a high tech surveillance system – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, September 19th

In a future dystopian Kobe, Japan, that looks remarkably like the present day Kobe, Japan, a group of highschoolers fail to get past the tough, power-dressed, Chinese lady bouncer to a club because they’re underage. A couple of the boys, Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), wandering down a nearby back alley, notice a man in a dark vest taking a crate of beer into the building, strip off their white shirts to reveal similar dark vests underneath, and use crates of beer to gain back door access. Inside, the DJ is electrifying, the beat is strong and the gig is everything they had hoped. There is a police raid, but Kou can’t get Yuta to leave. Somehow, they and the DJ end up being the only ones there, and he gives them a talisman as a mark of respect and tells them to come back for the second set, which is better. But they don’t chance their luck.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Ran
(乱)

Director – Akira Kurosawa – 1985 – Japan, France – Cert. 15 – 162m

*****

Back out in cinemas this Friday to commemorate its 40th anniversary.

—

Jeremy Clarke on Akira Kurosawa’s live action epic.

Ran is Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable 1985 free adaptation of King Lear.

More than any other Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) is responsible for bringing that country’s movies to the attention of international audiences. His first big exposure abroad came with the jidaigeki or period drama Rashomon (1950) which dramatised the story of a rape victim from different, successive character viewpoints. Entered in the 1951 Venice Film Festival without his knowledge, Rashomon unexpectedly picked up the prestigious Golden Lion award.

Subsequent international successes included Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) (1961). By the nineteen eighties, his productions had grown less frequent and more lavish with Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) (1980) and Ran (1985) requiring budgetary input from outside Japan.

Kurosawa’s influence abroad has been consolidated by various remakes of his films, with other countries adapting the Japanese elements to their own cultures. Many of his biggest international successes being period pieces have leant themselves to obvious translation into Westerns where gun-slinging cowboys were easily substituted for sword-wielding samurai.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Karate Kid
Legends

Director – Jonathan Entwhistle – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 94m

*****

Latest franchise entry plays by all the rules that you would expect, yet somehow manages to completely break the mould and come up with something fresh and original – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, May 28th

All a Karate Kid movie has to do is put a boy in peril from a bully or similar, then have him schooled in martial arts by a trainer to discover his inner strength and ultimately overcome the bully in combat. This is facilitated by a fight competition at the end, in which the two come face to face with one another. While the original The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1984) clearly struck enough of a chord to spawn more films, some entries, such as The Karate Kid Part III (John G. Avildsen, 1989), have felt worn, tired and clichéd.

That changed with the genuinely brilliant idea of introducing Hong Kong’s clown prince of kung fu Jackie Chan as the trainer in the two decades later remake The Karate Kid (Harold Zwart, 2010), which breathed new life into the big screen franchise (there have also been live action and animated spin-offs made for television).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Throne Of Blood
(Kumonosu-jo,
蜘蛛巣城,
lit. Castle
Of The Spider Web)

Director – Akira Kurosawa – 1957 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 110m

*****

Out on BFI UHD & Blu-ray on Monday, May 19th 2025.

Currently streaming on BFI Player alongside many other Kurosawa films together with a much wider selection of Japanese movies.

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays. In 1957, Kurosawa reworked it against the backdrop of feudal, 16th Century Japan. Ascendant samurai Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki) hear from an old crone at a spinning wheel in the forest that Washizu will become Lord of Cobweb Castle, later to be succeeded by Miki’s son. Washizu’s wife Asaji (Isuzu Yamada, her face rigidly fixed in Noh mask poses) preys on his insecurities to convince Washizu to murder his way to the top. Slayings, ghost sightings, hand washing and his demise duly ensue.

Not only does Kurosawa jettison all Shakespeare’s dialogue, he also makes the material thoroughly his own even while remaining true to its essence. For instance, when Washizu, eating in public, sees Miki’s ghost, Mifune with the camera following him starts running around like a man possessed, slashing wildly at an unseen apparition. Watching this, it’s hard to imagine it ever being shot on film (let alone performed on a stage) any other way.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Tokyo Pop

Director – Fran Rubel Kuzui – 1988 – US, Japan – Cert. 18 – 99m

****

A girl singer, fed up with being sidelined by the music business in New York, relocates to Tokyo and falls in with local rock band hopefuls there – select UK cinema screenings from Friday, April 25th prior to its Blu-ray release on Monday, May 5th

“Hey, Mike, when do I get to use my song?” asks the band’s disgruntled, leather-clad back-up singer, feeling redundant as she stands on stage holding a tambourine. Her music career in New York stalling fast, Wendy (Carrie Hamilton from Cool World, Ralph Bakshi, 1995; Shag, Zelda Barron, 1989) receives a “Wish you were here” postcard from her friend Jane in Japan and shoots back a reply: “Hope you meant it – ‘cos I’m coming.”

In Japan, a band does an English language cover of Blue Suede Shoes. When Wendy arrives in Tokyo, her girlfriend has moved on to Thailand. Barely speaking any Japanese, Wendy winds up in a cheap hotel in Itabashi the space of a small Japanese apartment where footwear is removed on entering and, as an Aussie resident tells her, everything operates on credit card and a shower is Y100 for ten minutes.… Read the rest