With dozens of the renowned filmmaker's works scheduled to be screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival over the next two weeks, we speak to the man behind the 'Evangelion' sci-fi franchise about his apocalyptic influences and prod him on the question that is on every fan's lips
The biggest event of the year for South Korea’s film industry is the opening night of the Busan International Film ...
The bad news? Japan has only one entry in the Competition section at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. The ...
At a time when Japan is being rapped over the knuckles by the U.N. for hate-speech rallies against ethnic Koreans, a movie like “The Tenor: Lirico Spinto” takes on special significance. Directed by Kim Sang-man, “The Tenor” (released here as “The Tenor: Shinjitsuno Monogatari”) ...
When indie directors take a more commercial turn, the usual explanation is the bigger paycheck, but it’s not always so simple. Yuya Ishii’s shift from the raucous films of his early career to the more genteel, mainstream 2013 film “Fune wo Amu (The Great ...
What do you do when you’re a has-been musician with thinning hair, staring at middle age and years of loneliness ahead? The good news — at least for Maxime (Vincent Macaigne) in “Tonnerre” — is that you’ve got a kind old dad (Bernard Menez), ...
The problems with “Greetings From Tim Buckley” begin with the title. The film isn’t really about 1960-70s singer-songwriter Tim Buckley — who died from an overdose in 1975 — so much as his son, Jeff, who produced a single hit album in 1994, “Grace,” ...
One of the best moments in “Grace of Monaco” comes when Alfred Hitchcock (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) visits Princess Grace (Grace Kelly, played by Nicole Kidman) in Monaco, hoping to lure her back to Hollywood via a starring role in his new movie “Marnie.” Ashton-Griffiths is ...
Most children’s animation these days is motor-mouthed to the extreme and larded with snarky pop-culture gags, but French film “Minuscule” takes a refreshingly different approach. Filmmakers Helene Giraud and Thomas Szabo honed their skills on animated shorts over the past decade and now drop ...
Director: Yoji Yamada Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Veteran director Yoji Yamada’s drama about an upper-middle-class family in 1930-40s Tokyo is deeply informed by Yamada’s own acquaintance with the era, from its social mores to its domestic arrangements. Told from the perspective of a ...
Director: Steven Knight Language: English This is almost “Old Boy” remade in London, with Jason Statham in the lead role. Statham is spot-on as an ex-special forces soldier on the run from a court martial. He ducks into the sleazy dreck of London’s underworld ...
Director: Edgar Wright Language: English Director Edgar Wright is usually a pretty safe bet for a good laugh (“Hot Fuzz,” “Shaun of the Dead”), but “The World’s End” is painful. Simon Pegg plays a middle-aged lout who enlists his reluctant old school friends (Nick ...
Imagine a band where the singer is so painfully shy and awkward that he must wear a giant papier-mache puppet head — not only on stage, but pretty much all the time. That’s the premise of “Frank,” starring Michael Fassbender under the mask; a ...
World War II-themed films by elderly Japanese directors with direct experience of the war are not only becoming scarcer, but are also distinctly different from those of younger filmmakers trying to appeal to a mass audience. Kazuo Kuroki’s 2006 film “Kamiya Etsuko no Seishun ...
‘Nymphomaniac”: The title itself is a provocation, not that we should expect anything less from Lars von Trier, the director who has specialized in nothing but. With the film coming on the heels of the extreme sexual violence in “Antichrist” (2012), and surrounded by ...
