Author Spotlight

Tony Rayns

Tony Rayns is a London-based critic with a special interest in the film cultures of East Asia. He has been awarded the Kawakita Prize (2004) and the Foreign Ministry of Japan’s Commendation (2008) for services to Japanese cinema. His books include Just Like Starting Over: A Personal View of the Reinvention of Korean Cinema.

8 Results
Branded to Kill: Reductio Ad Absurdum

Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

By Tony Rayns

There Was a Father: Duty Calls
At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he acce…

By Tony Rayns

The Only Son: Japan, 1936
At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Nineteen thirty-six was a decisive year for imperial Japan, marked by extreme violence at home and abroad. In the very early morning of February 26,…

By Tony Rayns

Empire of Passion: Love’s Phantom
At the request of the author, Japanese names in this essay are given in their traditional form: surname first. When Oshima Nagisa began making films for the French producer Anatole Dauman in the mid-1970s, his career as a filmmaker had been on hold f…

By Tony Rayns

Patriotism: The Word Made Flesh

The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.

By Tony Rayns

The Threepenny Opera: Doubles and Duplicities
Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the strange and comical history of how an eighteenth-century English play went through diverse transformations and finally became a hit movie banned by the Nazis . . . The initial impetus came from Jonathan Swi…

By Tony Rayns

The Burmese Harp: Unknown Soldiers

The first of his films to be shown outside Japan, Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature dramatically raised the director’s profile.

By Tony Rayns

Fighting Elegy

Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.

By Tony Rayns