Japanuary'26 - #15 As messy as overloaded. Feels like someone thought about a lot of certain scenes, but didn't care about how to bring them cohesively together. Telling the tale of Princess Kaguya in...

Japanuary '26 - #14 Frustration about corona and your period? --> Psychic powers! Not too far-fetched comparing this with Chronicle in a Japanese school setting during the pandemic, where some girls a...

Japanuary '26 - #13 This part of Yasuzō Masumura's works and career deserves more to be studied and analyzed. This twisted corporate world he creates is truly a battlefield in the hellscape of capital...

Japanuary '26 - #12 Bad film. As one can expext from a film where the title starts with a hashtag. It has all the ingredients to be an uplifting sport film I was honestly in the mood for, but I cannot...

Japanuary '26 - #11 When Japan was wild and didn't get a bleeding nose from handholding. Still, not a pinku film though. A group of high school girls starts exploring their sexuality aka finding out h...

Japanuary '26 - #10 Kind of hoped it would be a Japanese version of Queen's Gambit with Shogi, but for the most part it turned out to be a dragging soap opera with an odd focus, that could have been a...

A man gets lost in an underground passage. He follows the "guide" through the passage, but one after another, strange things happen to him. Is this space real? Or an illusion? Will the man be able to escape the passage?

Such a ragbag of mediocrity. I really enjoyed HIKARIs 37 Seconds and with how much sympathy and dignity she treated the protagonist's issues within a society that is used to turn a blind eye on people...

4/5: Die Fabrik, die titelgebend für Hiroko Oyamada's Erstlingswerk ist, stellt die Lebensgrundlage einer ganzen Stadt dar. Man kommt nicht an der Fabrik vorbei. Sie nimmt die meiste Fläche ein und is...

Japanuary '26 - #7 Meals that heal and connect. Didn't expect a quirky comedy about food to become a heart-wrenching tale about growing up, moving on and letting go. When a single mother is being igno...

Japanuary '26 - #6 Very basic melodrama I cannot say much about since I realized I'm not the right audience. It's basically a great filmed soap-opera I had not the patience for. Nowadays this would be...

One summer day, 400 goldfish were found in the swimming pool of a secondary school. This is a story about the four 15-year-old girls who put them there.

70 éves korában elhunyt Tarr Béla, a kortárs magyar filmművészet meghatározó és egyik legnagyobb hatású alkotója, a Sátántangó, a Werckmeister harmóniák és A torinói ló Kossuth- és Balázs Béla-díjas r...

Japanuary '26 Sai is truly a grim and bleak miniseries with a unique narrative structure that certainly will alienate a big part of its audience - and one of the best things I have watched in recent y...

Japanuary '26 - #3 Glad to see that Koji Shiraishi made a decent film again after the lackluster and wacky House of Sayuri. Same as Sayuri, Kinki, named after the region in Japan, is another adaptatio...

Japanuary '26 - #2 The Japansese Men and the Sea Biggest "selling point" here is Shinji Somai's outstanding cinematography. This film is probably one of the most beautiful portrayals of a Japanese coa...

Japanuary #1 Kicking off Japanuary right from the starting line with the most recent film. Kenji Iwaisawa, who already garnered attention and reputation with his little music-focused flick On-Gaku, co...

↓ English below ↓ Wenn Jounalisten mit Embargoes bis zum Erscheinungstag beglückt werden, weiß man was Sache ist. Trotz gewisser Qualitäten, ist der Film letztlich ziemlich redundant und verdankt sein...

Following sold out sessions at the Asian Film Archive, AFA’s Natalie Ng got to chat with director Nobuhiro Yamashita to reflect on Linda Linda Linda’s enduring popularity twenty years on.

Was very intrigued at first when I saw the cast consists of Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car) and Gwen Lu-Mei (Black Coal, Thin Ice; Wild Goose Lake) living together as a married couple in New York. ...

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This is my Ballerina. Not sure if they do themselves much of a favor with a trash title like this, but I would have not expected from a movie called "Ghost Killer" to see some of the best fighting sce...

Japanuary Wish I liked it more and could find the boys-version of the type of film here I would be able to praise besides "Linda, Linda, Linda" and "Swing Girls", but it didn't hit the right notes for...

Japanuary When you are eager for real horror, seeing my browser history is scarier than these cyber ghosts. Kinda unbelievable that with almost every release people appear and are aroused by the fact ...

Japanuary One of the typical 3.8 rated films on LB that can change your life. If I watched it earlier, it could have been one of the great taste-defining titles during the time when I was first expose...

Japanuary Shoutout to Arrow first for restoring these small unknown titles that would go more unnoticed otherwise. Even initially it was already released as a double bill with Ring 2 to draw every att...

Japanuary Asa ends up singing in a band and you didn't make this a music film, wtf? More or less coincidentally I ended up watching this as the second film by Natsuki Seta this week - right after Park...

Japanuary "Back when Gagarin made the first journey into space; "Sukiyaki" was #1 in the US charts; Astroboy aired on TV; the Olympics were held for the first time in Asia and the Vietnam war was goin...

Japanuary Not the usual revenge flick. Stylish and grounded. But also bitter and grounded. A neo-noir yakuza thriller that knows its limits - unlike its heroine. After the violent death of her husband...

Japanuary Facts first. It's based on a series of crime novels by Seishi Yokomizo starring detective Kosuke Kindaichi who appeared in over 70 novels. I haven't read an of them but I'm familiar with the...

Japanuary Never played the Fatal Frame/Project Zero games before, but know enough to tell that a certain camera takes a bigger role there than it does here, where it's easy to miss it is relevant in t...

Japanuary The most beautiful shades of grey. Despite the cinematography being that colorless and desaturated, it never reaches the point of feeling bleak. Instead, it's more like a gentle hug. A hug t...

Japanuary Didn't know it is an adaptation of an anime or manga first, but it becomes obvious quite early considering how fast the story progresses. Up to everyone to decide if it's a good or bad thing...

The film tells the story of Aiko, a 35-year-old mute woman who works in a bowling alley, and her brief romance with Yoshioka, a younger man who works as a postal carrier. The two meet when Aiko accide...

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Japanuary Remember watching it for the first time during the JFF x Moosic Lab collab festival that presented a lot of these peculiar little gems and without being really aware of it at first, it kinda...

Japanuary Well, another anthology. Tales from the Crypt in a Japanese night bus. Though, not a random clip compilation like those countless volumes of "videos of horror" etc., but it consists of works...

Japanuary Kei Fujiwara, who is most known for her acting role in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, wrote and directed her own feature film with herself in the main role that combines a crime plot with (really exp...

Japanuary When you are so introverted you rather give up the 500$ you just won than drawing attention to yourself. (: A 40y/o woman in a midlife crisis, living lonely and alone, wondering if life has ...

Japanuary One of these "Inaka"-genre films that promote the beauty and advantages of the remote countryside in Japan. Not as hardcore as the Little Forest movies later, but Naoko Ogigami has literally...

Japanuary As surprised as scared that this year is this films 20th anniversary! When you talk with someone about Japanese cinema, it never takes a long time until someone mentions this quirky dreamsca...

Japanuary There are two reasons I wanted to finally get it off of my pile of shame. First one is that this year marks the 30th anniversary of this debut feature film by Shunji Iwai (and the first one ...

ALT: a man is smiling while laying in bed with a blue pillow