Yu Irie delivers a samurai narrative that, while not able to match the masterpieces of the genre, offers everything fans have come to expect from the genre.
Tag: Japan
Demon City (2025) review
A fun, yet extremely forgettable experience.
A Girl named Ann (2024) review
One of most upsetting confrontations with the way the societal and familial Other can fail the subject.
Renoir (2025) review
Chie Hayakawa delivers an incredible moving experience that succeeds in exploring the difficulty for the subject to deal with death and the loss it introduces.
My Sunshine (2024) review
A bittersweet celebration of youth – seishun, celebrates the importance of the encounter and of desire, the force that pushes the subject towards inter-subjective connection.
Evil Does not Exist (2023) review
Ryusuke Hamaguchi offers a highly meditative exploration of the position of violence within the natural Real and the human symbolic, the realm of speech.
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.
The Young Strangers (2024) review [Camera Japan Festival 2025]
Uchiyama delivers a masterpiece that does not merely grab the spectator by his throat, but confronts him with the fundamental importance of the signifier in a heartrending way.
Baka’s identity (2025) review [Japannual 2025]
Koto Nagata offers the spectator a saddening but entertaining portrait of what the Japanese Other does not want anyone to see: the unsavoury marriage between crime and capitalism
Strangers in Kyoto (2025) review [Japannual 2025]
A light-hearted exploration of uncomfortable truths that marks our interactions with others/the Other – what we say is not what we mean; what we want to say we are not allowed to say; politeness is often a fabricated facade that we must believe in.
Truth or Lies (2025) review [OAFF 2025]
An incredibly satisfying film that does not merely show that subjects need the lie but also that it is, by virtue of fiction, that our signifiers have effects on the other.
Sympathy For The Underdog (1971) review
This is not merely classic that speaks to those who felt lost due to the rapid shifts that upheaved the Japanese societal field after the second world war, but continues to speak to those who feel out-of-place, who feel like Gunji unsuited for this world of ‘criminal’ suits.
Hijacked Youth – Dare To Stop Us 2 (2024) [Japannual 2024]
Inoue delivers a heartfelt ode to the mini-cinema and subjective failure.
Bushido (2024) review [Camera Japan Festival]
Kazuya Shiraishi proves that the frame of the samurai and the Edo society can still be utilized to deliver refreshing narratives.
The Japanese subject and the unconscious (part 2).
“It is, in other words, the moral plight/responsibility of psychoanalysis to urge subjects to think themselves from the sexual lack that marks their being and confront them with the sexual non-relation; ‘I’ll n’y a pas de rapport sexual.”
psychocinema 