In a career spanning three decades, Yoshihiro Nishimura has done about every job on the credit crawl — from gaffer to director. He is best known, however, as a mad master of effects and makeup, spewing blood sprays that achieve a certain demented grandeur ...
Banzai to fossil fuels! Lots of love to gas-guzzlers! That's the basic sentiment behind "Baby Driver," which is all screeching tires and revving engines, unfolding to what has got to be the coolest movie soundtrack of 2017. Directed by Edgar Wright ("Hot Fuzz," "Shaun of ...
Japanese directors have made films in many different settings, but it's safe to say Takeshi Fukunaga is the first of his countrymen to direct a narrative feature set partly in Liberia, a small African country not too long ago embroiled in a bloody civil ...
A "ghoul" was originally a creature in Arabic folklore that feasts on the flesh of the living or the dead, depending on the tale. The corpse-munching version became more popular in the West, but not in Japan, if Kentaro Hagiwara's hair-raising "Tokyo Ghoul" is ...
'The Mummy" begins with one main premise: Tom Cruise still has it. It ends with a promise: Tom Cruise will always have it. Assuming you're on board with those statements, you'll have a blast. On its own, however, "The Mummy" is pretty weird. It's like ...
The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and its aftermath have been the focus of many films, both fiction and nonfiction. However, most of them have been by filmmakers who've come from outside Fukushima Prefecture, where the disaster hit hardest. Ryuichi Hiroki, a native of ...
Bong Joon-ho's latest film, "Okja," received a four-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in May, an about-face reaction from the loud boos heard at the beginning of the screening. Those were likely due to a technical failure that delayed the screening for ...
In Japanese films, a lot of what used to be considered extreme is now routine. Geysers of blood and flying body parts may still thrill fanboys, but to me that sort of play violence has become about as exciting as the spin cycle. Hideo Sakaki's ...
Hot and humid Japanese summers call for kaidan, scary stories that send shivers down the spine. In the days before we had air conditioning, kids would gather around after dinner to tell and listen to those terrifying tales in an effort to chill out ...
Some actors have a knack for picking good material. And some, like Shun Oguri, drift from stinker to stinker: "Museum," "Terra Formars," "Galaxy Turnpike," "Lupin the Third." Still considered a box-office force despite this dismal track record, Oguri stars in "Gintama," the live-action adaptation of ...
Marriage scammers in the movies may be masters of deception, but their motives are usually clear enough. In Charlie Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947) the title character weds and murders widows to support his family. In Miwa Nishikawa's "Dreams for Sale" (2012), a husband and ...
Some 45 years after their first appearance on a San Francisco stage, The Residents remain a band that practically defines the term "cult," and their freak-show, cartoon-surrealist approach continues to attract a healthy fan base (as evidenced by some sold-out shows at Tokyo's Blue ...
