Japan
Blu-ray: Floating CloudsTuesday, 10 September 2024
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the... Read more... |
Prom 40, St John Passion, Bach Collegium Japan, Suzuki review - finesse and feelingWednesday, 21 August 2024
Bach’s St John Passion came into the world just three centuries ago, in Leipzig at Easter 1724. This year’s Proms shower of manna from musical heaven continued with a consummately polished, sensitive and – ultimately – very moving birthday... Read more... |
Album: Ryuichi Sakamoto - OpusWednesday, 07 August 2024
Ryuichi Sakamoto can be heard here, on Opus, surrounded by silence, shuffling at the keyboard, off-mic rustles and tells, recorded in the last year of his life, in September 2022 – he died early in the following year – as he sat to make his final... Read more... |
Tokyo Vice, Series 2, BBC iPlayer review - an exciting ride that stretches credibilityThursday, 30 May 2024
It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Two Films by Yasujirō OzuTuesday, 28 May 2024
It’s interesting to discover that sound wasn’t the norm in Japanese cinema until the mid-1930s: the huge cost of investing in pricey new studio technology and equipping scores of rural cinemas with amplification proving prohibitive.Yasujirō Ozu... Read more... |
Spirited Away, London Coliseum review - spectacular re-imagining of beloved filmThursday, 09 May 2024
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently... Read more... |
Evil Does Not Exist review - Ryusuke Hamaguchi's nuanced follow-up to 'Drive My Car'Saturday, 06 April 2024
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t cast a spell as strongly as his Oscar-winning hit Drive My Car, it is a thought-provoking film well worth seeing for anyone with an interest in ecology or a penchant for... Read more... |
Monster review - superbly elliptical tale of a troubled boyFriday, 15 March 2024
Monster is one of those films that you really shouldn’t read too much about before you see it, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to watch it all over again when it ends. It’s an intricately told psychological drama that grips from the... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Wim Wenders on 'Perfect Days'Wednesday, 21 February 2024
Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old... Read more... |
The Boy and the Heron review - elegiac swan song by the Japanese anime masterFriday, 22 December 2023
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes... Read more... |
Pacific Overtures, Menier Chocolate Factory review - lesser-known Sondheim scores afreshMonday, 11 December 2023
This is, by my reckoning at least, the third major London production over the years of Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's dazzling curiosity of a show first seen on Broadway in 1976 and reappraised ever since in stagings... Read more... |
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Hayward Gallery review - a Japanese photographer uses droll humour to ask big questionsTuesday, 17 October 2023
A polar bear stands guard over the seal pup it has just killed (main picture). How could photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto have got so close to a wild animal at such a dangerous moment? Even if he had a powerful telephoto lens, he’d be risking life and... Read more... |
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