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Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 14, 2020

Kazuhiro Soda shows how streaming could help save cinema with online release of 'Zero'

With COVID-19 having hit Japan's independent film industry hard, filmmakers such as Kazuhiro Soda are looking for new ways to reach their audiences.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 7, 2018

A cinema project expands to forge a bond between Japanese and Ugandan children

A project that began with a simple idea to deliver the magic of cinema to children in Africa has not only led to a cultural exchange but to an unlikely collaboration — the production of a music video by Japanese and Ugandan elementary school children.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
Oct 7, 2015

Tokyo's best art-house cinema reopens with Robert Altman documentary

When Yebisu Garden Place opened for business in Tokyo in 1994 you could walk through its marionette clock square, pass under a glass arch and find the best art-house theater in Tokyo — Ebisu Garden Cinema — tucked away beside a faux chateau. The debut film it screened was Robert Altman's masterpiece "Short Cuts," the first of many great films to be shown there.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Feb 23, 2015

'Timbuktu' director wants more cinema from West Africa

The Oscar nomination of "Timbuktu," a film about the occupation of the Malian desert town by al-Qaida-linked Islamists in 2012, should not mask the lack of established cinema from West Africa, its director said.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 30, 2020

‘Labyrinth of Cinema’: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s final film is a colorful antiwar fantasy

u201cLabyrinth of Cinemau201d bursts with energy, passion and dreamlike invention that immerses the audience in a world that is uniquely Obayashi's.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
Nov 11, 2015

Mitaka Community Cinema relives the glory days of local theaters

Ah, for the days of real movie theaters. Just as a certain Seattle-based company has made the brick-and-mortar bookstore obsolete, the real-deal cinema house died a slow death — first maimed by the multiplex and then killed by the Internet.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 26, 2023

‘Bad City’: A V-Cinema hero comes out swinging

“Bad City” boasts some bone-crunching action, but seems more interested in proving the awesomeness of producer-star Hitoshi Ozawa.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 4, 2007

Cinema goes back for the future

Cinema is on the ropes. So much so that a cabal of top Hollywood moguls are putting their faith in a very old idea -- one usually dismissed as a fad -- to save the day.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 29, 2010

How Japan embraced the advent of cinema

Japanese cinema was different from the very start. In the days of the silent movie, recitators called benshi, took it upon themselves not only to interpret the action, but to add their own vocal and acting embellishments as self-appointed supra-dramatists.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / CHILD'S PLAY
Mar 6, 2013

Babies at the cinema need not be a recipe for disaster

Kiko Blossom is sitting in a red velvet cinema seat next to a handsome young man. A box of popcorn lies between them and their eyes widen in anticipation as the opening credits of the latest James Bond movie begin to roll.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 4, 2020

‘What is Japanese Cinema?’ review: A deft and engaging history of Japanese film

This book is healthily nonjudgmental concerning which films are u201cgoodu201d and which are not. Instead it steps back — far back — to gaze carefully at and analyze the bigger picture: the role that cinema has played in reflecting and altering Japanese consciousness and Japanese reality over the span of a century.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 25, 2017

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia teams up with Exile's Hiro to create a contemporary fusion of vision and sound

From its debut in 1999 as the passion project of actor Tetsuya Bessho, Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia has grown into a big event on the local and regional film calendar. Size is one reason: The 19th edition, which unspools from June 1 to 25 at six venues in Tokyo and Yokohama, features nearly 250 films in a variety of genres.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 5, 2006

Evolution of Japanese cinema and the design of its creators

A HUNDRED YEARS OF JAPANESE FILM, by Donald Richie. Kodansha International, 2005, 320 pp., $22 (paper). Among Japanophiles, Donald Richie doesn't need an introduction, having written over 40 books on Japan, including the definitive works on directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, and the first-ever in-depth consideration of Japanese cinema, "The Japanese Film: Art and Industry" (cowritten with Joseph L. Anderson). As director and screenwriter Paul Schrader states in the foreword to "A Hundred Years of Japanese Film," "Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie."
CULTURE / Film
Apr 29, 2001

Cinema Italiano paradiso

Award-winning movie director Takeshi Kitano said Friday that the very mention of the word Italy brings to mind the kind of culture that puts present-day Japan to shame.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 16, 2006

Critical concerns about cinema

ASIAN CINEMAS: A READER & GUIDE, edited by Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham. Edinburgh University Press, 2006, 474 pp., £19.99 (paper). CONTEMPORARY ASIAN CINEMA: Popular Culture in a Global Frame, edited by Anne Tereska Ciecko. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006, 250 pp., £16.99 (paper). Critical methodologies evolve, a more recent group of assumptions replacing an older. At present Western approaches to Eastern cinema are newly crowded with postcolonial stances, the problems of perceiving the "other," the perils of Orientalism, the clutter of genre studies, and much more. One way out is to machete your way through. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, a U.S.-resident Japanese film scholar, has honed a two-way critical tool that divides foreign critics of Asian cinema into two groups.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 14, 2019

Japan's decade of 'closed country' cinema

As Japanese box office figures hit record highs in the 2010s, the country's film industry became increasingly insular
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 14, 2011

Busan festival takes a bold step, but is Asian cinema ready?

"Change" was the key word at this year's Busan International Film Festival, and not just because the organizers finally succumbed to the host South Korean port city's request to change the name from "Pusan." Lee Yong Kwan took over as festival director from founder Kim Dong Ho, who is credited with turning BIFF into Asia's biggest and most important film festival. But the main news was the opening of the Busan Cinema Center, a huge facility that has been in the works for more than a decade.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 9, 2011

Cinema Staff "Cinema Staff"

Now based in Tokyo, Gifu Prefecture-bred Cinema Staff played at the 2009 editions of both the Summer Sonic and Rock in Japan festivals. Formed in 2003, the indie-rock quartet issued three EPs prior to the release of their eponymous full-length debut.
JAPAN
Mar 11, 2006

Increase in cinema complexes, Japan films feed movie boom

Japanese films are experiencing a revival in popularity with several blockbusters coming out in rapid succession and more movie theaters going up across the country.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Nov 9, 2019

Georgian police arrest more than 25 in clashes at gay movie premiere

Police in Georgia said Saturday they had arrested more than 25 people after ultra-nationalist protesters attempting to derail the premiere of an award-winning movie about gay love clashed with security forces.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 31, 2019

Nobuhiko Obayashi: A life spent working among Japan's movie greats

As the Tokyo International Film Festival stages a retrospective of his work, filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi talks of a past working with movie greats, such as Akira Kurosawa
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 7, 2016

'Hitchcock/Truffaut': An auteur meets his (movie) maker

The French got Alfred Hitchcock well before the Americans did. In the 1950s, when the tubby director's Hollywood overlords still regarded him as a producer of light entertainment — the Robert Zemeckis of his day, perhaps — the writers at France's Cahiers du Cinema magazine recognized his deeper genius. A pugnacious young critic named Francois Truffaut ranked Hitchcock alongside Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman as prime examples of his "auteur theory," which viewed films not as group endeavors but as conduits for their directors' creative visions.
Straight-to-video films, locally called “V-Cinema,” were popular in the 1990s and into the 2000s, becoming a training ground and launchpad for Japanese directors and actors.
CULTURE / Film
Feb 8, 2024

Threatened with extinction, V-Cinema hopes for new saviors

Physical deterioration and copyright issues mar the influential film genre that once served as a launchpad for directors and actors in Japan.
Cinema at Sea film festival entry “God Is a Woman,” directed by Andres Peyrot, examines the complex feelings the Kuna, indigenous people living on Panama’s San Blas Islands, have about an unreleased documentary made about them in 1975.
CULTURE / Film
Dec 9, 2023

Cinema at Sea festival highlights diversity and unheard voices

The inaugural event for the film festival in Naha, Okinawa, boasted a strong lineup of features from places and peoples underrepresented in world cinema.
Hiroaki Wada (left), the director of Shimane Cinema Onozawa, and his wife, Sarasa, stand in an area selling snacks.
CULTURE / Film
Mar 26, 2024

Couple fills a void in rural Shimane by opening a cinema

Now one of only three movie theaters in the prefecture, Shimane Cinema Onozawa hopes to offer the joy of the big screen to residents of Masuda.
Nikon's acquisition of RED, a favorite in Hollywood, promises to propel the Japanese firm into the world of cinema.
BUSINESS / Companies
Mar 8, 2024

Nikon to buy U.S. cinema camera maker RED

The acquisition of RED, a favorite in Hollywood, promises to propel the Japanese firm into the world of cinema.
Cinema staff prepare servings of popcorn during an "all you can eat popcorn for 199 baht" campaign in front of a cinema inside a department store in Bangkok in November 2022.
BUSINESS
Sep 21, 2023

Southeast Asia cinema chains thrive as other markets struggle

Local box office records are being set, filmmaking grants are being unveiled and large cinema chains are shifting into expansion mode.
"Godzilla Minus One" director Takashi Yamazaki (second from left) celebrates with members of his visual effects team after they won the Oscar for best visual effects.
EDITORIALS
Mar 15, 2024

The night Godzilla trampled Hollywood

The humanity behind visual effects and animation won in the end, and Japan should be proud.
Veteran broadcaster and DJ Peter Barakan has been a fixture in Japanese music media for decades. He is now in his third year as curator and namesake of Peter Barakan’s Music Film Festival, which kicks off in Tokyo today.
CULTURE / Film
Sep 1, 2023

Peter Barakan's Music Film Festival celebrates cinema and song

The three-week event kicks off its third edition with 31 films including documentaries, concert films and narrative films centered on music.
Filmmaker Kah Wai Lim (left) interviews the owners of 22 independent cinemas across Japan about the difficulties and joys of running a “mini-theater” in “This Magic Moment.”
CULTURE / Film
Dec 7, 2023

‘This Magic Moment’: Mini-theaters keep indie cinema love alive

Kah Wai Lim highlights the resilient determination of small theater owners across the country who keep their businesses afloat against the odds.

Longform

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