To describe the plot of One Cut of the Dead is to (slightly) spoil it, but it is also to highly recommend it. Without giving away too many details, director Shin’ichirô Ueda delivers a film within a film within a film (plus a bit extra), making it a gloriously meta-meta movie about movie making. If…
The great Japanese director Hiorkazu Koreeda (“The Third Murderer”) continues his exploration of the true meaning of family In Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku), a quest he began in his award-winning 2013 film, “Like Father, Like Son.” Winner of the Palme d’Or award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and the first Japanese film to win the…
Performed at the Swan Theatre in July 1597, “The Isle of Dogs,” a satirical play (now lost) written by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson was labeled “seditious, slanderous, and lewd” by the government and led to the arrest of the actors (including Jonson) and the closing of all London theaters for months. The nature of…
The opening montage of dance clubs and riding motorcycles throughout the Japanese countryside flow along with an eerily tranquil score, letting audiences know from the onset that Ittetsu Nemoto is no singularly-defined monk. Filmmaker Lana Wilson and cinematographer Emily Topper (“After Tiller”) have teamed up with editor David Teague (“Life, Animated”) to explore one man’s…
The benefit of foreign cinema is that they tend to tell stories that shed a light on their own culture and tell stories a U.S. production would probably warp and bend into something more palatable for our sensibilities, losing that bit of cultural spark that elevated the material in the first place. The drawback is…
At the point in which Yoshiki, musical ombudsman, drummer, keyboardist/pianist and main songwriter of the Xtremely popular X Japan (simply X in Japan, though not in Japanese, for this is no ideogram, but only an alphabetic, apathetic X), Xtremely so in their Pacific archipelago, mythical prophets in their own land . . . at the…
Christianity came to Western Japan in 1542 by way of Jesuit missionaries from Portugal who brought gunpowder and religion. They were welcomed mostly for the weapons they brought and their religion was allowed to be practiced openly. Christianity was banned, however, after reports circulated of missionary intolerance towards the Shinto and Buddhist religions, and there…
