The title of this pre-Suicide Club entry—which Sion Sono categorizes as a straight pink film—pretty much sums up the film in its entirety. Together with…
I Am Keiko is a film caught within the dimensions of its maker’s head, composed of and consumed by the limits of that brain’s…
Where Shin’ya Tsukamoto pulled Japan’s industrial guts out and gave them horrid new life, Sion Sono dove in to the same viscera and lit…
Sion Sono’s 1990 debut feature is a coming-of-age story heavily influenced by the then-fashionable minimalist style, but with a few of its own distinctive…
Watching his 1988 film Decisive Match! Girls Dorm Against Boys Dorm, it’s hard not to imagine what a post-Suicide Club Sion Sono would do with…
It takes almost 30 minutes to introduce most (somehow still not all) of the major characters in David Ayer’s DC Comics adaptation Suicide Squad. A couple even get…
With the clarity of hindsight to our advantage, it’s easy to claim Sion Sono’s 8mm debut feature film to be a work of mad…
Sion Sono fans, this is where it all begins. The wild, irreverent, iconoclastic, in-your-face style familiar to those who’ve seen even a few of…
Sion Sono, known to most as a director of brutally violent films like 2002’s Suicide Club, can claim at least three titles in his filmography that contain the…
The 10th anniversary edition of Japan Cuts, North America’s largest festival for new Japanese film, wrapped this past weekend. Our third and final dispatch features a 2002 romantic…
When her son is killed in Nagasaki by the atomic bomb that ended World War II, Nobuko (Sayuri Yoshinaga), an elderly midwife faces life…
The most bluntly political of Japanese filmmakers, Masao Adachi returns to a comfortable controversy with his latest, The Artist of Fasting. Loosely based on a…
Kabali is an Indian gangster film, and the star vehicle for Tamil Nadu star Rajinikanth, the second highest paid Asian actor after Jackie Chan. Rajinikanth is big, but…
Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s filmography represents various generations’ desires for individual expression in a repressed Japanese society. His 1993 debut, A Touch of Fever, follows two…
An aesthetic tour-de-force if also an empty and unfailingly derivative one, actor Brady Corbet’s directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader, is based on a Jean-Paul Sartre short…
The 10th anniversary edition of Japan Cuts, North America’s largest festival for new Japanese film, runs from July 14th to the 24th, and we’re…
Sourcing material from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr certainly lends Yoshifumi Tsubota’s second film a certain pedigree—and indeed, The Shell Collector looks as if it…
Kako: My Sullen Past is a film that tells you life is boring. Even with the numerous odd events taking place, our titular character (Fumi…