An epic of intimate, heart-wrenching moments as Kinoshita’s incredibly moving anti-war film centers on a teacher newly posted to a class of first-graders in a poor Japanese seaside village during the late 1920s.
Although a tad plodding in its early stretches, this new Godzilla film combines thrilling spectacle with a grounding in narrative storytelling, as it psychoanalyses and indicts Japanese wartime militarism in hopes of a pacifist change in mentality.
Sublime, meditative yet elusive, Hamaguchi’s ecological drama isn’t that simple a concoction about capitalist expansion and its impact on the marginalised, exploring its theme on a more primal, anterior level.
A weaker work in Miyazaki’s oeuvre that while operating efficiently on plot and characterisation doesn’t quite do anything substantial thematically as a young witch travels to a new town to find work as a rite-of-passage.
The anxiety of opening one’s heart to another marks this underrated Miyazaki effort about a WWI pilot cursed to look like a pig—it could be his funniest film, yet the enveloping sense of nostalgia and memory makes us yearn for a past that we have never known.
Still as enchanting and imaginative as ever, even if Miyazaki’s work had to overcome some pacing issues and an anything-goes narrative.
Suzuki’s dynamic if provocative work here tells of the sexual politics of flesh and humiliation, set in postwar Japan under American control.
Wenders’ new film sees him return to Japan for a contemplative take on the human experience in modern society, following the daily routine of a cultured toilet cleaner who is obsessed with collecting cassette tapes of American oldies.
A triple-crossing crime actioner from master studio craftsman Suzuki that sharpened the critical focus on his thrilling devil-may-care filmmaking style.
A stunning ‘ethnographic’ work by Imamura about the age-old clash between ritualistic tradition and disruptive modernity as a Tokyo engineer visits an isolated island in order to develop it, only to find a superstitious, and even, incestuous, family dictating the law of the land.
Eternality Tan 