[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Recently, I’ve seen many hyperbolic statements circulating online declaring that Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8  is the “best video game adaptation ever made.” Having never personally played the source material (which I’d honestly kind of dismissed as shallow streamer bait—mechanically simplistic, deliberately designed to provoke humorous reactions to jump scares, little else of substance to offer), I cannot acc

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] At first glance, it’s a perfectly mundane image: the lobby of a public building. You’ve probably occupied hundreds  of identical spaces over the course of your lifetime; indeed, the associated sensory details are so intimately familiar that a glimpse alone is enough to evoke them: the texture of the tile floor, the odor of the air conditioner, the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. The longer your gaze

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The first movie I ever saw at Japan Society, way back in the ancient pre-COVID days of 2017, was a Meiko Kaji vehicle—specifically Blind Woman’s Curse , a delightfully weird relic of ‘70s exploitation cinema that blends chanbara  action, horror, grotesque comedy, and Butoh  into an unclassifiable cocktail of disparate yet harmonious artistic disciplines. So obviously, when the venue’s fine film programmer

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] A fiery sun blazes in a golden sky, scorching the earth below. Restless insects buzz and drone relentlessly, filling the still, sweltering air with a monotonous cacophony. And draped above a fleet of beached ships, limp sails hang motionlessly, undisturbed by even the gentlest breeze. The opening images of Iphigenia  immediately establish the film’s central conflict and narrative stakes. The assembled arm

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The “revenge film” has become a genre unto itself at this point. Death Wish , Rolling Thunder , John Wick , Lady Snowblood , Oldboy , any of the innumerable adaptations of Hamlet —viewers have become so intimately familiar with the basic tropes, conventions, and archetypes associated with these stories that I needn’t even bother listing them. The deceptively yet appropriately titled Revenge , on the other

[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Lancelot du lac  both begins and ends with scenes of shockingly graphic violence. Two knights clad in cumbersome suits of armor clash on a desolate battlefield, so thoroughly exhausted that they can barely lift their weapons. Finally, one combatant lands a decisive blow, beheading his opponent with one last desperate flail of his sword; the decapitated corpse collapses in a limp heap, gushing blood onto t

Attended the Orphans at MoMA: At Play—Amateurs, Animators, and Avant-Gardes  program at the Museum of Modern Art today. What a delightful celebration of the miracle of film preservation! The showcase (a recurring component of the venue’s annual To Save and Project  festival) revolved around an eclectic grab bag of obscure cinematic oddities: avant-garde  experiments, documentaries, early talkies designed to be viewed in the comfort of one's own home, and much, much more. The

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] All You Need Is Kill  is based on the same novel that inspired 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow  (also marketed under the equally unimaginative—though admittedly accurate—title of Live Die Repeat ), but apart from their shared premise—time loop, aliens, mechanized armor, the many brutal deaths of the protagonist—the two adaptations couldn’t possibly be more different. Whereas the earlier Tom Cruise vehicle is a fa

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] New Group  is a film about the horrors of conformity. The theme of collectivism gone awry is woven into every image. Symmetrical compositions abound, from sprawling grids of suburban homes to neatly arranged rows of desks. High schoolers bow, march, and chant in meticulously practiced unison, drilled ad nauseam  by tyrannical authority figures. And then, of course, there’s the bluntly literal manifestatio

The first thing you need to know about The King and the Mockingbird  is that it is clearly the product of many disparate styles,...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Greek drama is all about inevitability . The classical tragic...

One of the great pleasures of being an insatiably voracious cinephile is venturing off the beaten path of "canonical" classics and...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Kiyoshi Kurosawa is often described as a “J-horror” director, to the extent that casual fans could be forgiven for believing that he works exclusively in that particular genre. This assessment is, however, rather reductive and inaccurate; his actual filmography is significantly more diverse than his reputation (especially in the West) suggests, displaying an impressive degree of narrative and stylistic ve

Much like the legendary superhero around whom it revolves, the Menahem Golan-produced adaptation of Captain America  is a relic of a...

If you were to plot all self-starring music biopics on a spectrum, with A Hard Day’s Night  (shameless self-mythologizing) on one end and...

For my final screening of Japan Cuts 2025, I decided to go with the obligatory film about amateur filmmakers—a staple of the festival...

Promised Land  is an appropriate title for Masashi Iijima’s surprisingly mature directorial debut. It is, after all, a film about the...

The documentary has evolved in recent years; films like And Everything Is Going Fine , Tower , and (to a lesser degree) Witches of the...

The Little Girl if Hanoi  is a work of North Vietnamese propaganda. Which isn’t a judgment of the film’s quality, but rather a neutral...

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Orochi  is one of those miracles of film preservation: a...