“Bugnuts: The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch”

A Scooby-Doo mystery where Scoob is a winsome Japanese girl, quite literally a meddling kid. Continue reading →

“There’s No Ghibli Magic In ‘Earwig and the Witch”s 3D Mess”

A movie so bad, I may need a break from Ghibli for a while. Continue reading →

Review: Asako I & II, 2019, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Finally, what we’ve all been asking for this year: A doppelganger movie that isn’t distinctly a horror movie, and also doesn’t really stick to a single genre, either. Continue reading →

Review: Shoplifters, 2018, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Two Hirokazu Kore-eda movies! In one year! What a gift to all of humanity, Shoplifters in particular, this humane but knotty and deeply complicated movie; good though The Third Murder may be, it simply isn’t Shoplifters, the best “family is what you make it” movie of 2018 (and “family is what you make it” is indeed a surprising sub-theme … Continue reading →

Review: The Night is Short, Walk On Girl

Add The Night is Short, Walk On Girl to the canon of “great drinking movies.” The characters here drink more liquor than any mortal human could possibly imbibe without dying, much less without blacking out; they also have better adventures than most of us do when under the influence, though most of us don’t do the … Continue reading →

Review: The Third Murder, 2018, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

If you thought The First Murder was good, and if you liked The Second Murder, too, wait until you get a load of The Third Murder! Okay: Sorry. I’ve already made this joke on Twitter. It wasn’t funny then (lies! It was hilarious), and it isn’t funny now (see last parenthetical, asshole). But I couldn’t help myself. Talking about … Continue reading →

Review: Lu Over the Wall, 2018, dir. Masaaki Yuasa

I struggled to put my thoughts about Masaaki Yuasa’s Lu Over the Wall into words, which is really bad, because putting thoughts into words is sort of my thing. It’s not that I don’t like Lu Over the Wall, but rather that Lu Over the Wall is what I imagine your run of the mill psychedelic drug trip looks like … Continue reading →

Review: Before We Vanish, 2018, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

There’s no reason I should be giving a new Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie a sub-positive review score. Wait, hang on, let me start over: There shouldn’t be a reason for me to give a new Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie a sub-positive review score, but hey, Kurosawa gave me about three or four, so here we are. After reviewing Creepy … Continue reading →

Review: Mary and the Witch’s Flower, 2018, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi

I’m sort of a career goof, and so I have a natural inclination toward characters who are also career goofs. Meaning, there’s more than one reason why I compare Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower to Harry Potter. There’s the obvious reason – they’re both about schools for young witches! – and there’s the secondary reason, which … Continue reading →

The 50 Best Samurai Films of All Time

Samurai! So many samurai! Samurai all day long in this list of samurai films, I’m telling you. They’re even categorized based on the era of Japanese history in which they take place. That’s badass. Like a samurai. My name appears a bunch of times in this piece, and it’s such a well-researched, well-curated piece that I’ll … Continue reading →

Review: The Red Turtle, 2017, dir. Michaël Dudok de Wit

Surprise: Studio Ghibli made a beautiful movie. Once you’re done collecting your jaw from the floor, you can click this link and zip over to The Playlist and read the review I wrote about Michaël Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, a movie so lovely, minimalist, and thoughtful that it may assuage whatever sociopolitical anxieties you’re wrestling … Continue reading →

Review: Creepy, 2016, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

If you’re going to make a movie and title it Creepy, well, it better be creepy, so good job Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Your latest film justifies its name. Creepy is an unnerving little ditty, “little” being a somewhat misleading qualifier based on duration – it’s two hours long plus some change, but you barely feel it based on … Continue reading →

Review: Miss Hokusai, 2016, dir. Keiichi Hara

Maybe you like anime. Maybe you don’t. Maybe if you do, you think of “anime” in myopic terms and consider anything that doesn’t feature robots or monsters or other weird shit “anime,” but that’s dopey as fuck because “anime” is a word of pretty broad meanings. Besides that, Miss Hokusai, this little ditty I reviewed for … Continue reading →

Review: Belladonna of Sadness, 1973 (2016), dir. Eiichi Yamamoto

…yeeeeeah, I don’t know what I can say about Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness that I don’t say better and with more clarity (such as it is) in my Paste Magazine review. No lead-in here. Just click the link. You won’t be disappointed. Or maybe you will be. Then again, I compare watching this movie to … Continue reading →

Review: Only Yesterday, 1991/2016, dir. Isao Takahata

I’m cheating on the title here, and I know it, but: Only Yesterday, one of the earliest films by Studio Ghibli co-founder and all around genius Isao Takahata, has enjoyed neither a theatrical run nor a home video release here in North America since the film premiered twenty five years ago. (That, of course, doesn’t mean people … Continue reading →

Review: The World of Kanako, 2015, dir. Tetsuya Nakashima

“Just in time for the holidays, here’s a slice of existential parental terror: The World of Kanako, Japanese filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima’s follow-up to his 2010 film, Confessions. That picture made the AMPAS shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film back in 2011. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine the pundits who comprise the Academy’s voting body … Continue reading →

WTH Just Happened?: House

“For all of its oddities, grotesqueries and eccentricities, the single strangest thing about Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu) is probably its heritage. How does a legendary studio like Toho commission a film to capitalize on the success of Jawsand wind up with a haunted house flick? Forget the fact that House shares practically zero DNA with … Continue reading →

Review: R100, 2015, dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto

“In R100, Takafumi Katayama (Nao Ōmori), a workaholic father burdened by loneliness over his wife’s catatonic state, decides to sign up for a one-year contract with a gentleman’s bondage club. Membership comes with a few decidedly inconvenient stipulations; most notably, he must live all 365 days in constant anxiety over where, and when, he might … Continue reading →

Review: Outrage, 2011, dir. Takeshi Kitano

For the last decade, Japanese maestro Takeshi Kitano has taken a break from the Yakuza films that have come to strongly identify his entire body of work, turning to projects ranging from Zatoichi to his surreal and allegedly autobiographical trilogy of pictures starting with Takeshis and ending with 2008’s Achilles and the Tortoise. But ten … Continue reading →

The Criterion Files: Drunken Angel/The Naked City

Welcome to the first entry in what I intend to fashion into a weekly series. As the name suggests, the focus here is Criterion Collection films, the classics and masterpieces and unequivocal essentials that hold sway in cinematic canon. My goal? Grab two random entries from off of my shelf, or stream them through Netflix … Continue reading →