Genki Kawamura delivers an engaging and visually arresting psychological horror narrative that takes the concept of liminality to its anthropological origin.
Category: Social critique
A Girl named Ann (2024) review
One of most upsetting confrontations with the way the societal and familial Other can fail the subject.
HappyEnd (2024) review
An incredible tour-de-force that hits home.
Red Peony Gambler: Gambler’s Obligation (1969)
What invites us to qualify Suzuki’s narrative as a classic is not simply his continuation of Yamashita’s visual adoration of Junko Fuji, but his effective transformation of the Ninkyo thread into an exploration of the transgressive nature of desire as such.
New Group (2025) review [Japannual 2025]
Yuta Shimotsu delivers a narrative that, in all probability. will be called the first true J-horror classic of the current decade.
Flames of a Flower (2025) review [OAFF 2025]
A compelling exploration of the divergent ways subjects deal with trauma and the Other that fails to respond adequately.
Escape (2025) review [Nippon Connection 2025]
Adachi crafted a beautiful and affectionate piece on the troubled subjectivity of a subject who choose to escape, erasing his name from the societal field, to avoid capture.
Revolution +1 (2022) Review
Masao Adachi delivers an important political statement that, by offering an evocative sketch of Tetsuya Yamagami’s tragic trajectory, invites the Japanese spectator to question his own passivity towards the political Other.
I Am Kirishima (2025) review [OAFF 2025]
A timely narrative that highlights the inert quality of a societal field structured by capitalism and right-wing nationalism.
Desert of Namibia (2024) review [Japannual 2024]
Yoko Yamanaka delivers a cinematic masterpiece of subjectivity.
Snowdrop (2024) review [OAFF 2024]
A complex character portrait that touchingly illustrates how easy it is to misrecognize the logic of the subject-supposed-to-be-in-need.
Wash Away (2024) review [OAFF 2024]
A pleasant narrative that offers a fresh but familiar exploration of the subject’s fundamental desire for recognition/love and the problematic yet medicative function of consumption.
Monster (2023) review
Kore-eda succeeds in delivering an utterly engaging narrative about the fundamental misunderstanding that underpins our fabrication of our truth.
A Far Shore (2022) review
A highly engaging story that explores the destructive effects of a societal field that fails to reach out to subjects-in-need.
Halloween Special Review: Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan part 1 & part 2 (1949) review
Kinoshita offers an incredibly engaging psychological exploration of Iemon’s faltering ego and the dramatic shift this faltering causes in his relationship to Oiwa.
psychocinema 