japan

Nov 30, 2016 — The Lone Wolf and Cub film series has its roots in Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga of the same name, which was itself a major influence on Western cartooning and illustration in the 1980s. It felt only natural to...

Nov 22, 2016 — This month, we’ve brought two new Criterion editions to the United Kingdom: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, a visually sumptuous showcase of the Japanese master at the height of his imaginative powers, and Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson’s deliriously eccentric take on...

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 18, 2016 — A dazzling mix of folklore, myth, and the director’s own nighttime visions, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams represents a late-career burst of creativity from one of the masters of Japanese cinema. Over the course of the film’s eight surreal episodes, Kurosawa moves...

Nov 11, 2016 — The DailyLegendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who created some of the most indelible images in film history, has passed away at the age of ninety-two. The BFI pays tribute to him by republishing an article from the winter 1965–1966 issue...

Nov 4, 2016 — For our edition of the six-part chanbara epic Lone Wolf and Cub, we spoke with the author of the wildly popular manga series on which the films are based.

Sep 22, 2016 — As part of a two-month series highlighting Yasujiro Ozu’s late-career work, the Pacific Film Archive is showing Equinox Flower, a family drama about a conservative father and his rebellious daughter, who refuses to accept his plans for her arranged marriage.

Sep 16, 2016 — Critic Phillip Lopate explores the duality of the director’s approach to his female protagonists and asks whether his films are proto- or antifeminist.

Sep 14, 2016 — Asian-cinema expert Tony Rayns unpacks the significance of Zatoichi’s name and the strict social hierarchy that the character so gleefully upends.

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.