
Film / Reviews Mar 3, 2022
‘The Last 10 Years’: Keep a hanky handy for this weepy romance
by James Hadfield
Michihito Fujii’s splashy terminal illness drama can’t help succumbing to the usual genre tropes.
‘The Last 10 Years’: Keep a hanky handy for this weepy romance
Michihito Fujii’s splashy terminal illness drama can’t help succumbing to the usual genre tropes.
‘Parasite in Love’: Pulpy drama has young love on the brain
Kensaku Kakimoto’s moody romance has an interesting premise about the relationship between love and mental illness, but it doesn’t quite settle on the right tone.
‘Moonlight Shadow’: Dream-like mood piece depicts grief with aching clarity
Nana Komatsu’s performance as a woman mourning a lost love anchors Edmund Yeo’s seductive adaptation of a Banana Yoshimoto short story.
‘Sakura’: A family held together by dogged devotion
Hitoshi Yazaki turns Kana Nishino’s novel about a family overcoming tragedy with the help of their dog into an amiable but wildly uneven drama.
'Family of Strangers': An admirable ode to the institutionalized
Hideyuki Hirayama's latest feature, filmed in a real psychiatric hospital in Nagano Prefecture, tells the story of three residents of an institution who form an unlikely bond
'Farewell Song': Guitars without rock 'n' roll excess
Of all the many breeds of musician out there, few are as stubbornly uncinematic as acoustic singer-songwriters. Forget flamboyance, creative excess, clashing egos and all the other qualities that tend to attract filmmakers to the music industry in the first place. The average singer-songwriter ...
'Hero Mania': Japanese heroes are keeping it real
Why don't Japanese audiences turn up in big numbers for Hollywood superhero movies? The rare success in Japan of the Spider-Man series suggests one answer: Japanese like superheroes just fine, as long as they're flawed humans as well as heroic fighters for justice. Another case ...
NNN Document 16; Fukigen-na Kajitsu; WOWOW
Tokai Television has become an expert on the subject of adoption in Japan, and this Sunday it will air the latest installment in its series "NNN Document 16" (Nippon TV, 12:55 a.m.) The program follows Emiko, a 56-year-old woman who only last year discovered she ...
'Bakuman' depicts a life-or-death quest for manga success
High school kids dream big dreams, and in Japan one of the biggest is to be a successful manga artist. The financial rewards for a hit manga published in a national magazine and sold in paperback editions are substantial. And the accompanying recognition and ...