Japan
Giri/Haji, Series Finale, BBC Two review - a thriller, but much more besidesFriday, 06 December 2019
Happily, Joe Barton’s tinglingly original thriller (BBC Two) finished as smartly as it began, not by any humdrum tying-up of loose ends but by giving free rein to the story’s ambiguities and impossible choices. If indeed they really were choices.... Read more... |
Midway review - gung-ho heroes battle moribund scriptFriday, 08 November 2019
Director Roland Emmerich has been trying to make this movie since the 1990s, and battled hard to raise its $100m budget from individual investors. But why? The result is an old-fashioned war film in praise of the heroic American servicemen who... Read more... |
Giri/Haji, BBC Two review - inspired Anglo-Japanese thriller makes compulsive viewingFriday, 18 October 2019
Well here’s an interesting one. We’ve been up to our eyebrows in Eurocops for the past few years, but this Anglo-Japanese fusion from BBC Two (the title translates as "Duty / Shame") feels strikingly fresh and different.It began, as policiers are... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: MiraiTuesday, 02 July 2019
Mirai made animation history when it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2018, the first Japanese anime feature to be so honoured. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Director Mamoro Hosoda, who worked at Studio Ghibli before... Read more... |
Hiromi Kawakami: The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino review - Don Juan as a salarymanSunday, 26 May 2019
My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That delicate, unsettling tale of a romance between a younger woman and... Read more... |
Manga, British Museum review - stories for outsidersThursday, 23 May 2019
Manga, the Japanese art of the graphic novel, took its modern form in the 1800s. Illustrated stories already had a long heritage in Japan — encompassing woodblock prints and illustrated scrolls and novels — but the introduction of the printing press... Read more... |
Pokémon Detective Pikachu review - a cute commercialFriday, 10 May 2019
This is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of the Pokémon franchise, bringing the video game’s cute critters into a live-action, film noir world, as Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) turns Holmes-hatted detective to help teenage human Tim (Justice Smith) find his... Read more... |
DVD: Mifune - The Last SamuraiMonday, 15 April 2019
Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 early masterpiece Rashomon was a revelation for post-war western screen audiences, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year and becoming a standard-bearer for the new generation of Japanese film. Its lead... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Kankyō OngakuSunday, 10 February 2019
Of the 20-plus names gathered on the superbly packaged Kankyō Ongaku, it’s likely that only Yellow Magic Orchestra and their members Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto are familiar to most non-Japanese listeners. Initially, it seems a big ask to... Read more... |
Shoplifters review - deserved Cannes prize winnerSaturday, 24 November 2018
When a film is about a crime family, audience expectations tend to involve mobsters and thrills, but that’s not the territory that Hirozaku Kora-eda is exploring here. He opens his tale with a camera tracking leisurely across a Tokyo supermarket. A... Read more... |
Kusama - Infinity review - amazing tale of survival against the oddsThursday, 04 October 2018
Wearing a red dress covered in black polka dots and a bright red wig, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sits drawing, a look of intense concentration on her face. It takes her three days, she says, to finish one of these huge repeating patterns (main... Read more... |
CD: Tim Hecker - KonoyoSunday, 23 September 2018
It may be mean to say, but it seems sadness agrees with Tim Hecker. The Canadian has been a mainstay of the global experimental music world almost since the turn of the millennium, sitting somewhere between neo-classical, shoegaze, ambient and... Read more... |
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