The "visitor from another planet" story is doable, even for an indie filmmaker with no budget. All you need are aliens who have assumed human forms, but don't quite get the whole humanity thing. Two recent examples are Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2017 films "Foreboding" and ...

Held annually from 1990, save for 2007 when its host town was facing financial difficulties, the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival has become a little corner of Hokkaido where for four days in March the cinematically weird and wonderful can flourish. I had long wanted ...

Food is sustenance, food is pleasure and, as Eric Khoo's nostalgia-drenched "Ramen Shop" reminds us, food is memory. The last is not often seen in Japanese foodie movies, which tend to focus on the hero's arduous journey to mastery of a culinary art. So when the ...

Going to Bangalore, a city of more than 10 million people in India's south, to spend five days watching movies is not the sort of thing I usually do. Which is exactly why I agreed to serve on a jury for the Network for ...

Running scenes have been a staple since the start of the movies, but in the silent days the fleet-footed hero was usually trying to outrun the police. Now, competitive running in its various forms, from the ekiden relay to the marathon, has become a ...

Many Japanese filmmakers try to promote their films and talents abroad but stumble more than they succeed: Either Cannes rejects their latest masterpiece or Hollywood turns down their J-horror script.

Japanese movies about cats and their human companions are by now an established local genre — or rather a feel-good-movie sub-genre since nearly all try to leave the audience with warm smiles and lowered blood pressures. This has proven to be a reliable box ...

Hollywood sends its products all over the world but global audiences can have widely different experiences of the same Hollywood movie. In Italy, dubbing foreign films is standard; in Japan, subtitling is, though dubbing has become more common, especially for films targeted at younger ...

Places considered cool and uncool sometimes exist in uneasy proximity, like New York City and New Jersey — or Tokyo and Saitama. The prefecture adjacent to the Japanese capital has the image of being a land of boring commuter towns with no cultural attractions ...

The 2019 Oscar race is entering its final stretch, with prognosticators already unveiling their lists of winners. This year two Japanese films are up for Academy Awards — Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Shoplifters" (best foreign language film) and Mamoru Hosoda's "Mirai" (best animated feature film). An executive ...