Japanese cinema

A young girl walks through the forest alone. Naked limbs of trees carve up the bright sky as Eiko Ishibashi’s score swells like a scene straight from a fairy tale, but fairy tales don’t exist. A distant gunshot disturbs the peace in this…

Hayao Miyazaki is back with what is reportedly his final film in the recently released, The Boy and the Heron. I had the privilege of checking out this film for myself, so let’s dive into the beauty of Studio Ghibli’s latest addition and…

SPOILERS (for a 50-year-old movie)  Masahiro Shinoda’s seminal new-wave noir Pale Flower opens with Yakuza member Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) returning to Tokyo after three years in prison and noting that ‘nothing has changed’. As the camera…

The aptly-titled A Family competently treads familiar ground. This yakuza action-drama, written and directed by Michihito Fujii, suffers from attempting to cover too many narrative beats, but does well when working within the stylised…

13 figures step forward, dark shapes emerging against the early morning mist. They have spent days turning an abandoned village into a death trap, crafting spiked barriers, piling dry straw on bulls and creating a small forest of spare…

The Rashomon effect is a term used to highlight the condemning unreliability of eyewitness accounts. With the Rashomon effect, the eyewitness account is subject to truth, lies and everything that lingers in between. It is a filmmaking…

In 2017, filmmakers Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko joined forces in directing their stirring debut Kuro. Kuro follows the uncanny story of Mr. Ono (Mr. Black in Japanese). The story is recounted by a young Japanese woman named Romi, as she…