Despite its 2012 release, Bad Film captures a Sion Sono before he reached international acclaim; before his particular brand of otaku-influenced action films; and before his…
Only in a filmography as stylistically restless and formally anarchic as Sion Sono’s would a somber family drama like The Land of Hope be considered a radical…
Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an epic, four-hour romantic comedy about terrible fathers, upskirt photography, Catholicism, and the meaning of love. Where Sono’s Bicycle Sighs could be categorized…
Werner Herzog’s latest documentary demonstrates the master’s ability to both simulate an evenhanded exploration of multiple view points and assert his own, unwavering allegiances with…
One task of the critic is to place a film within the context of its artist’s entire body of work, looking for recurring themes, motifs, obsessions,…
An anomalous tearjerker from Sion Sono couched between some of the director’s most outré genre eruptions, Be Sure to Share channels Sono’s own grief over the…
When the director of a film is also its screenwriter it’s relatively safe to assume that what you’re watching—outside interference notwithstanding—is a story that they actually…
Though it sports a few grisly images of its own, Noriko’s Dinner Table borrows most of its bloodshed from its companion film, Suicide Club. Sono…
Pull any Sion Sono movie off the shelf and chances are somebody somewhere has called it his “most extreme.” With a filmography as pervasively perverse…
If there’s one word that beats at the heart of the violent, restless Hazard, Sion Sono’s 11th film, it’s “transcendence.” Nominally a crime story about a Japanese…
An early moment in Sion Sono’s 2005 feature Into a Dream finds dorama actor Mutsugoro Suzuki (Tatsushi Tanaka) attending a low-budget Japanese-language staging of A Streetcar Named…
Suicide Club opens with a montage of the city at night: documentary realist footage of pedestrians moving through Tokyo, on and off of trains and…
Initially presenting as another in a long, increasingly ossified line of rural neo-noirs (see also Out of the Furnace, Cold in July, Bad Turn Worse,…
Sion Sono’s eighth feature refined and nearly perfected his early, amateurish Dogme 95-esque aesthetic. Billed as a “film about the human body,” The Real Body is a totally…
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 his…
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 capacity…
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 a…
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 quirks.…
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 this…
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 introduced…