Tag - yoko-maki

 
 

YOKO MAKI

A woman (Yoko Maki) haunted by the trauma of her husband’s unexplained disappearance hires a detective to find answers in Rikiya Imaizumi’s “Undercurrent.”
CULTURE / Film
Oct 5, 2023
‘Undercurrent’: All is not lost in cathartic drama
Yoko Maki and Arata Iura deliver committed performances in Rikiya Imaizumi’s introspective film about people who vanish for inexplicable reasons.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 26, 2016
'My Uncle': Time to wake up and smell the coffee
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 my feeling as I exited "My Uncle," Nobuhiro Yamashita's new comedy starring Ryuhei Matsuda as the titular uncle.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 11, 2016
'After the Storm': Koreeda's tempestuous family affairs
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 dissolution, but his take on it is quite different from that theme's most famous exponent, Yasujiro Ozu.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 26, 2013
Mark Schilling's 2013 Top 10: Farewell to Ghibli's anime masters
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 material has put a damper on its creativity, while abroad the demand for quirky, violent films from Japan is still strong. Often lost in the cracks are good indie films that try to tell original stories about actual human beings.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 1, 2013
'Su-chan Mai-chan Sawako-san'
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 a three-act story. Doable, yes. Done well? Not so often.

Longform

High-end tourism is becoming more about the kinds of experiences that Japan's lesser-known places can provide.
Can Japan lure the jet-set class off the beaten path?