VENICE 2024: Super happy forever (2024)
★★★★☆
Super Happy Forever by Kohei Igarashi is a star-studded Japanese love story in reverse.
Japan
Evil Does Not Exist (2023) (Aku Wa Sonzai Shinai)
★★★★☆
Evil Does Not Exist by Palme-d’or-winning director Ryu Hamaguchi is a sensitive, mesmeric ecological fable.
Cannes Film Festival 2022 Day 1: Opening Film Coupez! (Final Cut) 2022
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival Day 1: Opening Film Coupez! (Final Cut) 2022 – the Opening Film Out of Competition is Final Cut directed by Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist).
Drive My Car (2021)
★★★★★
strong>Drive My Car, directed with a delicate, luminous touch by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, deservedly won the Oscar this week for Best Film International Feature, the first Japanese film ever to do so.
BFI LFF 2021: Drive My Car
★★★★☆
Drive My Car is directed with a delicate, luminous touch by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Cannes Film Festival 2021: Day 6
★★★★★
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Day 6
First Love (Hatsukoi) (2019)
★★★★☆
Deceptively titled First Love is Takeshi Miike’s irresistibly anarchic yakuza noir, stuffed with gratuitous violence, comedy, romance and severed heads.
Maborosi (1995)
★★★★☆
Following Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner and Oscar-nominated Shoplifters, UK audiences now get a chance to see the director’s earlier work Maborosi for the first time.
Cannes Film Festival 2018: Day 6
★★★★☆
Cannes Film Festival 2018
The Third Murder (2017)
★★★★☆
The Third Murder by Hirokazu Koreeda is a totally absorbing philosophical exploration of the nature of truth and freedom and whether they can exist, the difference between the law and justice, and whether anything differentiates murder and the death penalty.
London East Asia Film Festival: Before We Vanish (2017)
★★★★☆
Before We Vanish by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a genre-bending Japanese bodysnatchers movie that provokes an alien apocalypse on Earth.
Your Name (2016)
In Makoto Shinkai’s haunting Japanese anime, two teenagers swap bodies and lives.
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Cannes review: Before We Vanish (2017)
★★★★☆
Before We Vanish by Kiyoshi Kurosaw is a genre-bending Japanese bodysnatchers movie that provokes an alien apocalypse on Earth.
Mr Long (2017)
★★☆☆☆
Rehabilitating the hitman with Japanese kindness, Sabu’s Mr Long flickers between moments of splendour, kitsch and sentimentality.