Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...

Sep 29, 2022 — This October, we’re summoning our demons with an expansive collection of ’80s horror and a roundup of Universal monster movies.

Oct 24, 2019 — D irector Ishiro Honda gathered his crew and gave them an ultimatum. He was about to put his career at risk, and he would only work with those who approached his current project—a movie about a radiation-spewing prehistoric reptile that...

May 3, 2018 — Two of the earliest films to depict the bombing of Hiroshima show how politics shapes national mourning.

Jul 21, 2026 — At the beginning of Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the title splashes across the screen in fiery red. Each of the three Japanese words that appear offers a key to understanding director Nagisa Oshima’s breakthrough film and the energies that...

Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...

Mar 18, 2025 — This stellar entry in one of cinema’s greatest monster franchises combines science fiction’s age-old exploration of human arrogance with the full force of cinematic imagination.

Oct 24, 2019 — With deafening footfalls and an earsplitting roar, Gojira, known in the West as Godzilla, first thundered into Japan’s movie houses on November 3, 1954. Six and a half decades later, the monster presides over an international entertainment franchise, having starred...

Jan 26, 2018 — The Berlin International Film Festival, whose sixty-eighth edition runs from February 15 through 25, rolled out the lineup for the Forum last week, and today, it’s added Special Screenings to the section. With notes from the festival:James Benning’s 11 x...

May 17, 2016 — Juxtaposing a vision of a stark, primitive existence on a remote Japanese island with that country’s vast twentieth-century modernization, Kaneto Shindo reveals Japan’s postwar paradoxes and makes a case for its essential, immutable character.