“A touching and satisfying tear-jerking experience.”
Category: Slice of Life
Ribbon (2022) review
Non, in short, proves with her first feature film that she has a future as screenwriter and director.
I’ve Died a Lot Lately (2021) review [JFFH 2022]
Kanemoto proves that he has the talent to create, with a limited budget, a narrative that is not only creative but able to give the spectator a good time.
Short movie Time: The Stolen Ocean (2022) review [JFFH 2022]
Noaya Asanuma proves that he has a creative voice worth listening too.
The Light Of The Spring (2022) review [OAFF 2022]
“An experimental ‘dramamentary’ that succeeds to charm and touch the spectator with its rich mundane and genuine interactions.”
Short Movie Time: The Fish With One Sleeve (2021) review
“Tokaibayashi Tsuyoshi delivers an important narrative that reveals how a societal system, which struggles with the newly-posed riddle of gender, problematizes the integration of the transgender subject in its fabric.”
An inn at Osaka (1954) review
“An important document that traces how the post-war capitalistic machine of modernity poisons subjectivity by ‘promoting’ a selfish monetary desire, slowly empties social relations, and causes a blossoming of a wide range of subjective conflicts and societal problems.”
Tapestry (2020) review
“Yes, Zeze delivers a rather straightforward romance narrative with Tapestry, but, in contrast to many other Japanese romance films, he succeeds to genuinely move the spectator.”
Short Movie Time: Born Pisces (2020) review [Japan Cuts 2021]
“Yamanaka does not only reaffirm that she has talent but also that she improved her compositional style and her storytelling.”
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) review
“An essential viewing for all who holds the art of cinema dear.”
Goto-san (2021) review [OAFF 2021]
“Gokan expertly reveals the position of the freeter as an attempt to escape the capitalistic machinery but also as a position that most easily falls prey to the ugliest structures of exploitation to keep the profit-focused system going.”
Black Rain (1989) review
Imamura’s ‘Black Rain’ is, without a doubt, one of the most important films about the atomic bomb ever made and should be mandatory viewing for anyone who holds the promise of world peace dear.
Mio On the Shore (2019) review
A great and visually pleasing narrative about the socially embedded nature of the process of coming-into-being-as-subject.
Along The Sea (2021) review
An amazing and highly relevant narrative that succeeds in exposing the dark exploitative and de-subjectifying tendencies of Japanese society.
Sakura (2020) review [Japannual 2020]
“A great narrative that does not only show that family happiness is but a semblance – behind the smiles hides pain and sadness – but also the very fact that the subject can only grasp his present subjective state by narrativizing (and, in many cases idealize) his past.”
psycho-cinematography 