"The First Monday in May" opens April 15 at the Bunkamura Le Cinema Theater in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya Ward (the Japanese title is "Metto Gara, Doresu o Matotta Bijutsukan"). It's a documentary about a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition titled "China: Through the Looking ...

"The Great Wall," a lavish Hollywood production that looks like it cost a gazillion dollars (or, more accurately, $150 million), is directed by China's Zhang Yimou — or Yimou Zhang as he's now known on many online film sites. In recent years, Zhang's name has ...

"Ankoku Joshi" is a murder mystery involving six pretty JK (slang for joshi kosei, high school girls)" who all have something to hide. The film's title literally means "pitch black girls," which pretty much explains their characters' personalities in what soon becomes a grisly ...

In the first episode of Japan's latest contribution to original Netflix programming, "Samurai Gourmet," Takeshi Kasumi enters a small teishoku (set meal) joint and grapples over whether to have a beer with lunch. Inspired by an imaginary samurai, he gets one. That's it. For viewers ...

When Owen Suskind was 3 years old, he suddenly "vanished," according to his mother, Cornelia. The vivacious little boy she knew had retreated into a shell of silence from which he refused to emerge, and doctors diagnosed him with autism. It was 1996 and little ...

Call it a massive literary hoax or twisted identity theft. Or just call it art. Either way, "Author: The JT LeRoy Story" will fascinate and at the same time cause much frustrated head-scratching. This documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig puts the novelist Laura Albert on center ...

If you're one of those people who bought a Kangol cap in the late 1990s with the notion that maybe it will make you seem as cool as Samuel L. Jackson (I plead guilty), then read on. SLJ (as he's often called in the U.S., ...

A lot of feminists hate Morten Tyldum's "Passengers," and for good reasons. Though it's set in a bright, high-tech future where luxury space travel is the norm, where women are concerned the story's underlying sentiments hail straight from the Middle Ages. On the other ...

Asia is brimming with exciting travel destinations. Each country is like a world unto itself, with new languages and customs to learn, food to try and experiences to have. Like everyone else, Japanese take vacations for any number of reasons, but the majority seem to ...

Six years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated the Tohoku region, leaving more than 18,000 people dead or missing, and triggering meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant that has left a deeply embedded mistrust of nuclear ...