Tao Nashimoto’s “Ano Sora no Ao (Halcyon Skies),” which premiered at this year’s Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, is the type of lyrical, personal, naturalistically acted and elliptically narrated Japanese indie film I used to see by the dozen in the 1990s but is ...

Yoshimitsu Morita, who died last December at 61, would seem to be a classic example of a brilliant young independent filmmaker who ends up as a mainstream journeyman, a career path all too common in Japanese films. After winning international praise for “Kazoku Gemu ...

Of Japanese movies about star-crossed young lovers there will never be an end. The mostly female audience never tires of them, decade after decade. The genre has hardly gone extinct in the West either, though fans now tend to like their romantic fantasies spiced ...

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hollywood rolled out multiplex-ready films focusing on the events of that tragic day. In the year since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in the Tohoku region, dozens of Japanese and foreign filmmakers have ...

Movie trailers and TV commercials both exist to sell, but unlike ads for toothpaste or instant ramen, trailers offer a direct experience, however manipulated, with the actual product. So websites that post links to trailers are not just shilling for distributors, but also offering ...

The farce as a genre doesn’t get a lot of respect, relying as it does on wacky, paper-thin characters and a story that is just an excuse for knock-about gags. But making one that truly works as a film, not a drawn-out skit, is ...

Japanese comics have been translated into English and other languages by the hundreds, but overseas publishers have long overlooked one of the biggest local genres: gag manga. Their usual excuse is that Japanese humor, which relies heavily on untranslatable wordplay and cultural in-jokes, doesn’t ...

In movies as in life, first impressions count. Hence all the money lavished on opening credits, all the thought devoted to opening scenes. Quite often though, the flashy, clever beginning comes to feel like a con, as the formulaic story wends its way to ...

The pioneers of the rock ‘n’ roll era on both sides of the Atlantic have now largely faded from the show-business scene — which is hardly surprising, given that those still strutting their stuff are in their 70s and 80s, and even “The King” ...

Ninja movies come with certain expectations, especially in the West. One is for action of the fantastic sort, with the ninja performing feats impossible to real human beings without assists from wires or CGI. Another is that, dramatically, they will be laughably bad. So ...