Shingo Matsumura’s Love and Goodbye and Hawaii is a rare gem, an off-beat light comedy about young people that is neither cute nor contrived,…
Takuro Nakamura’s West North West—the direction to Mecca from Tokyo—details a sort-of-kind-of love triangle between three women: Iranian exchange student Naima (Sahel Rosa), bartender Kei (Hanae…
“The selling point is that they’re not yet developed” says otaku Shin after seeing a concert of middle school-aged girls singing their hearts out to a…
Marking French writer-director Jean-Gabriel Periot’s first step into fiction filmmaking (after a string of documentaries), Summer Lights opens, fittingly, with a simple, sustained talking-head…
Okinawan filmmaker Gō Takamine’s Hengyoro is an unclassifiable collage. More or less centered on the story of a couple of elderly men who perform what…
In The Great Passage—a film for which Yûya Ishii won Best Director from both the Japanese Academy Awards and Kinema Junpo—the decades-long story of dictionary…
Beneath the lightly comedic surface of Yuki Tanada’s My Dad and Mr. Ito lies a more serious and sharply observed riff on Tokyo Story…
Although widely dismissed during its initial premiere, Daguerrotype, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first French-language production, finds the Japanese genre master in peak form; the first hour…