Japanese Story

Feb 23, 2017 — The week before Get Out opened to groundbreaking box-office success, we spoke with the director about the fine line between comedy and horror.

Jan 27, 2017 — Did You See This? In a new interview with Film Comment, Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak discusses his collaborations with Krzysztof Kieślowski and his transition to working on Hollywood films like Gattaca and Black Hawk Down. “After the unexpected explosion of...

Jan 6, 2017 — Did You See This? With Alain Resnais’s Muriel, or The Time of Return now streaming on FilmStruck, Leo Robson explores how this radical meditation on memory “invites broader questions about what happens when we return to a movie: Is rewatching...

Nov 18, 2016 — For Film Comment, Marc Walkow surveys the career of director Tomu Uchida, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many commercial Japanese directors of his era, Uchida has long been underappreciated in the West,...

Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.

May 5, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis Saturday, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in California will kick off a comprehensive Seijun Suzuki series (running through June 30), celebrating the visionary Japanese director’s revelatory body of work. On Sunday night, the museum will...

Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.

Mar 17, 2016 — Repertory Picks This weekend, Row House Cinema will launch the first-ever Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival, featuring four diverse films by some of Japan’s most beloved filmmakers—including Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Among the films screening during the festival is Ozu’s...