Though not wanting for the anticipated grisly violence or digressions into pop pastiche, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood might be Quentin Tarantino’s sweetest, most…
On paper, Hakota Yuko’s debut feature, Blue Hour, has much promise. The film was inspired, in some measure or another, by Isao Takahata Studio Ghibli anime…
The 2019 edition of New York-based film festival Japan Cuts runs from July 19 to the 28th (find the full schedule of screenings here). We…
Hiroshi Okuyama’s debut feature, Jesus, displays impressive technical mastery; besides writing and directing, the filmmaker served as cinematographer and editor. The academy ratio framing, combined with…
Sayaka Kai’s Red Snow opens with a small, obscured figure running through a blizzard, their red jacket a blurry smear against a field of white.…
Released in the summer of 1983, one year after Steven Spielberg’s E.T and four months after Ronald Reagan unveiled his plan for “Star Wars,” Brian Eno’s Apollo:…
Our monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition of…
Ever since Kathleen Edwards decided to take a break from music and open a coffee house in Stittsville, Ontario, alt-country’s been sorely missing one of…
Beautiful Lie caps a trilogy of releases this decade from husband-and-wife duo Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis (the other two being 2013’s Cheater’s Game and 2014’s Our Year)…
More than half the songs on Thomas Rhett’s Center Point Road could believably slide into the Today’s Top Hits playlist on Spotify — which is…
Willie Nelson has always been prolific — writing songs, collaborating with anybody and everybody, often releasing multiple albums within the span of a single calendar…
Aaron Watson compiles a hefty 20 tracks on his towering double album Red Bandana, a number that bears some sentimental significance: There’s a song here…
It was the time of the outlaw. Waylon Jennings’s 1973 Honky Tonk Heroes had already set the mould for a type of country music that…
Jeux de plage, the debut feature from Japanese director Aimi Natsuto, is a film that’s more than eager to engage with the greats of French…
Set in the Osaka slum of the title, The Kamagasaki Cauldron War’s very existence testifies to its politics: it defies a local ordinance that deems…
Being Natural is one of those impossible objects, difficult to talk about without spoiling but also not particularly interesting to think about without acknowledging its…
Sho Miyake’s And Your Bird Can Sing, based on a novel by the late Yasushi Sato, is sort of like Jules and Jim in Japan.…
As the former assistant and protégé of the great Hirokazu Koreeda, Nanako Hirose has made a debut film that unsurprisingly doesn’t stray too far from…
The 2019 edition of New York-based film festival Japan Cuts runs from July 19 to the 28th (find the full schedule of screenings here). We…
Say what you want about endless Marvel entries and Star Wars episodes, but no film so perfectly represents fears of a total corporate takeover of…
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is at his best when he’s unabashedly romantic. For more than a decade, he’s crafted ambient tracks that tend to brim with overwhelming…