Japan
DVD/Blu-ray: An Actor's RevengeSaturday, 07 April 2018
Japanese director Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge is something of a one-off. Even in the context of the prolific director’s career variety, it’s an unusually stylised and visually captivating story of high artifice – there’s rich melodrama in its... Read more... |
Isle of Dogs review - canine caper with a messageFriday, 30 March 2018
This isn't a feature about London's former docklands (although much of it was made in a studio nearby), but rather Wes Anderson's second foray into stop-motion animation (after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox) and a quiet hymn to two of his... Read more... |
The Third Murder review - unpacking a crime enigmaFriday, 23 March 2018
Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu offers up mystery aplenty in his new film The Third Murder, enigma and riddle too. He also moves away from the territory of family drama for which he is best known. There’s similar intensity in some of the... Read more... |
The Great Wave, National Theatre review - moving epic of global lossTuesday, 20 March 2018
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “... Read more... |
Roma Agrawal: Built review - solid loveSunday, 11 February 2018
"I've been known to stroke concrete," writes self-professed geek Roma Agrawal – and from the very beginning of her memoir-cum-introduction to structural engineering, Built, where she describes her awe as a toddler at the glass and steel canyon of... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2017: Ryuichi Sakamoto - asyncFriday, 29 December 2017
From his days as a session musician in mid-Seventies Tokyo through global mega fame in Yellow Magic Orchestra and on, Ryuichi Sakamoto has always had a Stakhanovite work ethic. And that's still the case, even at the age of 65, and despite the fact... Read more... |
LFF 2017: Blade of the Immortal / Redoubtable - Samurai slasher versus the Nouvelle VagueThursday, 12 October 2017
This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran... Read more... |
CD: Boris – DearWednesday, 12 July 2017
Boris are a trio of Japanese noise rockers who are masters of all things heavy, and Dear, a double album of superior quality, marks the band’s 25th anniversary as a going concern. Covering a range of bases from doomy slabs of heavy noise to riff-... Read more... |
After the Storm review - quietly nuanced and moving Japanese family drama impressesFriday, 02 June 2017
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is a master of family drama, carrying on the traditions of his illustrious predecessors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. But these are not films of raised voices or open conflict, rather highly nuanced studies of... Read more... |
The Red Turtle review - Studio Ghibli loses its magic touchSaturday, 27 May 2017
A man is caught up in a storm at sea; giant waves like Hokusai crests throw him onto a deserted tropical island. Over the next 80 minutes, his struggle to survive occupies the screen. Curious crabs provide a little company, but not enough to stop... Read more... |
Haruki Murakami: Men Without Women review - a bit too abstract and post-modernSunday, 14 May 2017
“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” says a woman in “Scheherazade”, one of the most intriguing of the seven stories in Men without Women - it was previously published in the New Yorker, as were four of the others in the collection. Murakami is... Read more... |
Blu-ray: TampopoTuesday, 09 May 2017
This is a very welcome 4K digital restoration of Juzo Itami's extremely tasty Japanese comedy from 1985. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Tampopo ("dandelion" in Japanese), a widowed café owner with a small son. She dishes up bowls of ramen noodles to... Read more... |
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