There is a subgenre of documentaries that interrogates the act of filming so-called truth while ostensibly presenting something true. This Oscar-winning film is centrally about Vladimir Putin&#8217…

Documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi struck paydirt when he found a middle-aged female archaeologist to comment on her work in a storehouse for artifacts unearthed during digs of the legendary cit…

It was certainly inevitable that Steven Spielberg, after the most enviably productive career of any American film director in history, would try to summarize that career in various ways as he appro…

TV or not TV

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) is one of the world leading press clubs, providing a forum for journalists and public figures in Tokyo.

By pretty much every metric last year’s Osaka Expo was a success, an outcome that surprised a lot of people given the problems leading up to it. However, there was one problem that remains un…

Loyal dog movies and TV shows were once a staple of American entertainment, but if Heart of the Beast feels too much like a throwback it tries to make up for its anachronistic vibe by centering the…

The problem of rental properties for the elderly has been widespread for many years, but as the predicted aging of Japanese society has progressed apace, the problem has become a full-blown crisis.…

Modern life prioritizes convenience to the point where we take progress in terms of service for granted and forget to realize that convenience often comes at a price—to someone else.  Take par…

Modern life prioritizes convenience to the point where we take progress in terms of service for granted and forget to realize that convenience often comes at a price—to someone else.  Take par…

Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices was inspired by a real life scandal surrounding the Prague-based children’s choir Bambini di Praga. In 2008, the choir’s leader, Bohumil Kulínský,…

Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices was inspired by a real life scandal surrounding the Prague-based children’s choir Bambini di Praga. In 2008, the choir’s leader, Bohumil Kulínský,…

Only a few seconds into this harrowing black comedy by Mary Bronstein, the protagonist, a fortyish Long Island mother named Linda (Rose Byrne), says to her complaining young daughter, “I&#821…

MUFG Bank On September 5, Sankei Shimbun ran a story that’s gotten a lot of attention. Sankei reports that the homeowning rate among Japanese people in their 20s is the highest it has ever be…

MUFG Bank On September 5, Sankei Shimbun ran a story that’s gotten a lot of attention. Sankei reports that the homeowning rate among Japanese people in their 20s is the highest it has ever be…

At this point, it seems impossible to talk about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without addressing his faithfulness—or lack of it—to the original text, which is more than 3,000 years old. It…

One of the nicer touches in Tracie Laymon’s reportedly semi-autobiographical movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, is the perpetually cracked screen on the cell phone used by the protagonist, Lily Tre…

National Film Archive of Japan in Kyobashi, Tokyo On June 25, the National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ) announced it was launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for its continuing operatio…

Folk horror meets generational family trauma in this confusingly intense exercise in sophisticated campfire ghost storytelling. It’s the bleak 1970s in Yorkshire, England, where academically …

A mentor and a movie freak

Frederick Wiseman, who died in February, was not only America’s greatest documentary filmmaker, but an anthropologist of rare insight. Though he is mainly famous for perfecting the so-called …

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has already proven herself to be an imaginative creator of documentaries with Four Daughters, a film in which she showed the real-life subjects of her story coa…

Horror movies work best when their scares are rooted in identifiable psychological unease. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, one of the most discussed American horror movie of the year, based on Parso…

The “truth is stranger than fiction” documentary is almost a movie genre unto itself, though its appeal is mostly ironic: no self-respecting novelist would ever countenance a story this…

Data center under construction in Inzai The Japan Times ran a very good article last June that we found particularly interesting because it focused on the construction of data centers in the Chiba …

But not necessarily by choice

Though I’m sure there were cinematic treatments of the horrors of new motherhood before Rosemary’s Baby, it was Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s bestseller that in…

One of the problems that critics of AI encounter when they complain about its effect on movie-making is that a lot of green-lit content in Hollywood already feels as if it’s been produced by …

But not necessarily by choice

Since the only film other than The Drama by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli I’ve seen is his last one, Dream Scenario, I don’t have much insight into his approach except the feelin…

As a filmmaker, Guy Ritchie hardly has any original ideas, but he’s developed an action-movie style that puts the viewer at ease quickly and painlessly. His films, regardless of the subject m…

A movie whose main promotional hook is that it’s produced by J.J. Abrams and features dinosaurs is probably a sure box office bet for its opening weekend. Cinephiles who may need more convinc…

It’s not taking anything away from director Tsou Shih-ching to point out that her debut feature was co-written, co-produced, and edited by Sean Baker, whose last movie, Anora, swept the Oscar…

An August in Omiya

Section of tunnel that goes through Shizuoka Prefecture After years of delays, the Shizuoka section of the ambitious Chuo Shinkansen project, better known in Japanese as the “linear motorcar&…

Section of tunnel that goes through Shizuoka Prefecture After years of delays, the Shizuoka section of the ambitious Chuo Shinkansen project, better known in Japanese as the “linear motorcar&…

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) is one of the world leading press clubs, providing a forum for journalists and public figures in Tokyo.

No movie franchise has genericized the high-concept plot dynamics and pop culture jokiness of post-Pixar American style animation as much as the Despicable Me series. It’s why the Minions, th…

The pleasures inherent in historical dramas usually lift them above the average movie in terms of what the viewer can take away from them, which mostly has to do with placing the viewer in an unfam…

Get your balls, pucks, Scrabble boards and packs of cards away from me – all I want is space to be together, ideally with a coffee or a glass of wine, says writer Emily Watkins

It’s difficult to screw up a coming-of-age story if you have good intentions. The indignities of puberty immediately lead to internal conflict, and while the physical changes an adolescent go…

Foreigners attending night junior high school (Withnews) In Japan, compulsory education stops after junior high school, and though the vast majority of Japanese people now graduate from high school…

Not enough hours in the day

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ) is one of the world leading press clubs, providing a forum for journalists and public figures in Tokyo.

Friday morning The weather forecast for this year’s Fuji Rock Festival hasn’t been encouraging. Rain pretty much every day, but right now the sun is out and the temperature is quite bearable. It wa…