Some movies are like a relaxing soak in a bubble bath with your favorite rubber duck. Your soul may not soar, but when you finally emerge you feel lighter on your feet and at peace with the world. What's wrong with that? That was ...
Hirokazu Koreeda has a reputation abroad as the one director of his generation carrying on the humanist tradition of Japanese cinema's 1950s and '60s Golden Age. This is not totally off the mark — he often returns to that favorite Golden Age theme, family ...
Japanese films did quite well both commercially and critically in 2013, with Hayao Miyazaki's final feature animation, "Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)," thumping the Hollywood competition at the local box office. But the industry's over-reliance on sure-thing manga, TV shows and novels for source ...
Yonkoma manga, or four-cell gag comics, are popular here with both sexes and all ages, but they account for relatively few of the many hit live-action films made from manga. For one thing, it's not so easy to string all those gags together into ...
