Released in 2003, Takashi Shimizu's "Ju-on: The Grudge" and "Ju-on: The Grudge 2" both had a simple premise — vengeful ghosts turn an ordinary suburban house into a death trap — but the scares, such as a kohl-eyed dead boy with a terrifying grip, ...
It's China in 1941 and the Imperial Japanese Army is on the move. A band of freedom fighters led by Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) seek to hijack a train line that transports food supplies to the invaders, get away with the loot and feed ...
One of the attractions of Asian martial arts for many Westerners (including this one) is the promise of self-improvement that goes beyond better street fighting. In Kazuyoshi Kumakiri's "Mukoku," a turgid film set in the kendo world, mastery of the sword is supposed to not ...
Izuru Narushima's "To Each His Own" is a serious treatment of the theme of "black companies" that flirts with fantasy in its first half but shades to heart-warming melodrama in its second.
As weird as it sounds, "I Am Not a Serial Killer" feels like a "Back to the Future" episode gone horribly wrong, proffering a twisted, satanic version of the Doc-Marty relationship.
"Radiance," winner of the Ecumenical Prize at Cannes, is being promoted as a love story, but director-scriptwriter Naomi Kawase has more on her mind than getting her age-inappropriate pair into a clinch.
Imagine "Ponyo" but with a whole lot of dancing. Boiled down, that is what you get with "Lu Over The Wall."
In "A Beautiful Star," Lily Franky plays the father in a family that turns out to be made up mostly of aliens.
In last week's review of Yuya Ishii's "The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue," I wrote that poetry-based Japanese films are rare — but here seems to be another: Toshimitsu Iizuka's "Poetry Angel." One more example and I'll have a ...
With "Arrival," director Denis Villeneuve takes a very familiar alien invasion scenario and tries to put a new twist on it. While everyone from H. G. Wells in "War of the Worlds" to Roland Emmerich in "Independence Day" has envisioned a swarm of spacecraft ...
These days, Japanese films are based on everything from novels to game apps, but Yuya Ishii's "The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue," which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this year, is a rare feature inspired by a book ...
I've always had a soft spot for M. Night Shyamalan, even despite the fact that he has made a total of two truly successful films — "The Sixth Sense" (1999) and "Unbreakable" (2000) — over the course of his over-20-year career. The rest of ...
