Japanese Story

Jul 28, 2020 — The films of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda are graceful meditations on memory and the inextricable connections that bind our lives together. Whether transporting us to a way station in the afterlife or into a household in crisis, his character studies...

Jul 14, 2020 — Bruce Lee seemed born to be on-screen. At three months old, he appeared as an infant in a Hong Kong movie called Golden Gate Girl (1941). After he died suddenly of cerebral edema in 1973 at the age of thirty-two,...

May 16, 2018 — Critical reception is subdued compared to the raves for Happy Hour (2015).

Jul 9, 2007 — Set almost entirely in a single house, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s eloquent collaboration with writer Kobo Abe shows both his powerful staging and his love of fine, almost microscopic, detail.

Jun 29, 2017 — Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, “about a World War II flyboy, now a serial rapist and murderer, would have violated just about every commandment in the Production Code,” had Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt stuck...

Aug 29, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...

Jul 16, 2024 — In one of the most patient films he has ever made, Wim Wenders captures how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

Dec 12, 2023 — Deep Dives Beloved for his poetic observations of domestic life and intergenerational conflict, Yasujiro Ozu is an icon of international art-house cinema whose patient, exquisitely restrained style has influenced filmmakers around the world. But even though he directed more than...

Oct 28, 2019 — This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival salutes two singular directors, both in their eighties now but still going strong.

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.