‘It’s a Flickering Life’: A heartfelt ode to golden oldies spread thin
Veteran filmmaker Yoji Yamada’s tribute to the film industry and the audiences who are keeping it alive is well-meaning but doesn’t quite hit its mark.
‘I Fell in Love Like a Flower Bouquet’: Millennial romance with a Gen X heart
Kasumi Arimura and Masaki Suda star in an entertaining but inauthentic portrait of 2010s romance, penned by veteran TV screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto.
'Love At Least': There's a shadow looming over this tale of romance
Mental illness takes many forms, but depression is among the most baffling to family and friends, since the afflicted may be physically healthy and verbally coherent but barely stir from bed for weeks or months at a time. But as Kosai Sekine shows with compassion ...
'Spark': A fool and a straight man walk into a bar...
Stand-up — one comic in front of a microphone — is the default setting for live comedy in the United States. In Japan the equivalent has long been rakugo, a traditional form in which a single performer tells comic stories. Today, however, aspiring ...
Last summer, "Your Name.," Makoto Shinkai's anime about gender-swapping high school lovers, began its triumphant march into the box-office record books. Not surprisingly, this summer has seen the arrival of more teen romances, but "Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the ...
Gross-out gags make 'Gintama' a miss
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 ...
'Teiichi: Battle of the Supreme High' takes high school politics to a whole new level
Japan's film and TV industries are populated by hundreds of comedy writers, but few find politics funny, at least in public. One exception is filmmaker Akira Nagai, whose power struggles unfold not in the Diet, but at an elite boys' high school in "Teiichi: ...
Painful love in decaying Hokkaido port town
My interview with Mipo Oh, the director of the turbulent new love drama "Soko Nomi Nite Hikari Kagayaku (The Light Shines Only There)," did not begin smoothly.
