Netflix series 'The Naked Director' has been a runaway hit, with a second series announced shortly after the first began streaming. But not everyone is a fan.

Koki Mitani's latest comedy feature follows the life of a Japanese prime minister trying to make good as he deals with memory loss

Masahide Ichii delivers a drama about family members dealing with their own long-standing resentments while facing an impending typhoon

In a four-decade career, Haruhiko Arai has become an acclaimed scriptwriter with credits that include "Vibrator" (2003), "It's Only Talk" (2005) and "Kabukicho Love Hotel" (2014), three of the best films by his frequent collaborator, the director Ryuichi Hiroki. Arai also edits and publishes "Eiga ...

The seishun eiga (youth film) is not exclusive to Japan — plenty of films from elsewhere deal with the joys and agonies of adolescence — but this popular genre has acquired certain only-in-Japan quirks. For one thing, many seishun eiga directors are old enough to ...

Genres never really die, but they often mutate into something different on foreign soil. John Ford's cowboys became Akira Kurosawa's samurai, and Kurosawa's samurai became Sergio Leone's serape-clad, cigarillo-chewing "The Man With No Name." And the list goes on. The same is true of that ...

The Japanese film industry has made many musical films, but almost no Hollywood-style musicals. One reason why is Eizo Sugawa's "You Can Succeed, Too" (1964), a singing, dancing salaryman musical inspired by the Broadway hit "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Billed ...

As a reviewer, reporter and programmer, I go to six or seven film festivals a year. This is nothing compared to some colleagues, who trudge the festival circuit in a never-ending loop, but it's enough to give me a heap of festival badges. My trip ...

Last year, Shinichiro Ueda made Japanese film history with "One Cut of the Dead," a zombie comedy he scripted and directed. Opening in just two Tokyo theaters in June, 2018, the film ended up earning ¥3.21 billion — or more than 1,000 times its ...

On Aug. 12, 1989, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano's debut as a director, "Violent Cop," was released in Japan. Kitano was already famous here as a TV comic and emcee, and was known abroad for his role as a brutal POW camp guard in Nagisa Oshima's ...