Tag: japanese film
Challengers & Evil Does Not Exist
Friday, April 26th, 2024 Film Reviews,Challengers may be the first tennis movie that really takes us onto the court. When racket connects with ball it’s as if an exocet missile has been fired. Every contact between ball and court is explosive, as director, Luca Gaudagnino pumps up the volume and pushes us back into our seats. Sweat doesn’t drip from […]
Perfect Days
Thursday, April 4th, 2024 Film Reviews,If you thought Kenny (2006) would be the only film you’d ever see about a toilet cleaner, in Perfect Days Wim Wenders shows us there’s plenty of life in this universal subject. Like Shane Jacobson’s Aussie “waste management expert”, Hirayama, a middle-aged man with a neat moustache and salt-and-pepper hair, is completely satisfied with his […]
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Friday, April 29th, 2022 Film Reviews,Ryusuke Hamaguchi was as surprised as anyone by the extraordinary success of Drive My Car, which won the 2022 Academy Award for Best International Feature, and was nominated in the Best Picture category. To my mind, it was infinitely superior to CODA, the feelgood flick that took out the top prize. In a career of […]
Drive My Car
Friday, February 11th, 2022 Film Reviews,Drive My Car is a long film, but possessed of such quiet intensity one barely notices the time slipping by. Another distraction is that the credits don’t appear until more than half an hour into the movie. By then we’ve stopped expecting them and they come as a surprise. Suddenly it seems that everything we’ve […]
Shoplifters
Friday, November 30th, 2018 Film Reviews,Everyone knows George Santayana’s famous line: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. This is axiomatic, most especially in an age when attention spans are shrinking to the size of a mobile phone screen. The philosopher’s second-most-popular quotation is rather more problematic. When Santayana wrote: “The family is one of nature’s […]
JFF Encore
Saturday, July 5th, 2014 Film Reviews,With film festivals increasing in number every year, and existing festivals getting bigger, it’s easy to miss the stand-out items in any program. The Japan Foundation has found an innovative way of addressing this problem with the Japanese Film Festival Encore screenings. From 9-13 July, the Foundation will be running a “Japan Academy Awards Edition” […]
A Ghost of a Chance
Saturday, November 26th, 2011 Film Reviews,With some films box office success owes as much to timing as to the intrinsic qualities of actors, directors or cinematographers. I don’t mean genre pictures made for the Christmas market, but those rare films that capture the spirit of the times. Frank Capra’s movies did this in the 1930s and 40s, with their parables […]
Norwegian Wood
Saturday, October 29th, 2011 Film Reviews,Norwegian Wood will do nothing to dispell the popular preconception that Japanese films are obsessed with sex and death. It is a long, slow, intense story about a young student, Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama), and his relationship with a disturbed girl, Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi – the schoolgirl from Babel). It is a tale saturated in melancholy, […]