Teenagers take chances that, to the adults in their lives, are sheer idiocy (as I know first-hand from both sides of the teenager-adult divide). These days anything they do or say can also end up on social media, which can instantly turn an adolescent ...

It has been more than two decades since Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda began collecting major festival invitations and prizes as the leaders of Japanese cinema's 1990s new wave. Since then younger directors have struggled to crack this "4K" establishment ...

"There will never be another you" goes the old song. Then again, some people believe in doppelgangers, doubles to living humans who are ghostly in form and malign in intent. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Asako I & II," which screened in competition at this year's Cannes Film ...

Chess pops up in a surprising number of feature films. Just look at all the documentaries and dramas about the outrageously gifted Bobby Fischer. Shogi, or Japanese chess, is a different and smaller story, though "Satoshi: A Move for Tomorrow," a 2016 film about ...

Compared to today's Tokyo, where teenagers quietly curate their Instagram feeds in Starbucks and tourists happily snap selfies from the middle of Shibuya Crossing, the 1990s were a wilder, freer time. Shibuya was then the domain of the kogyaru, teenage girls who cheekily flouted traditional ...

Once a maker of Hollywood-style sci-fi ("Gunhed," 1989) and noir ("Painted Desert," 1993), Masato Harada has become a director of films about fact-based, character-testing group missions, be it police routing radicals from a Karuizawa villa ("The Choice of Hercules," 2002) or samurai fighting the ...

Summer was once the peak season for horror in Japan, part of the local custom of beating the heat with chills from scary stories. But since the decline of J-horror a decade or so ago, local horror films have become harder to find in theaters, ...

Student crushes on teachers are a pop culture staple (ask any Van Halen fan). In real life, they're a minefield, with trip wires becoming ever more sensitive. "Sensei Kunshu," Momoko Koda's hit manga about a teenage girl (Minami Hamabe) goo-goo-eyed over a handsome math teacher ...

Marvel and DC may rule the North American multiplex, but that doesn't mean their fans have read the source comics. In Japan the opposite is true: The manga comes first and foremost in a media chain that eventually leads to anime, games and, at ...

By documenting the tales of those who lived through the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, filmmakers Chie Mikami and Hanayo Oya question the island's current role as a military stronghold.