Japanese cinema has one of the longest traditions of horror anywhere in the world, rooted in kaidan ghost stories that stretch back centuries. Films like The Ghost of Yotsuya and The Snow Woman brought those folk terrors to the screen with a distinctly poetic menace. Browse Macca's reviews below to see how that tradition holds up.
Rating: 3.5★
Video game adaptations have, for the better part of three decades, carried a reputation somewhere between "ambitious misfire" and "straight-to-bargain-bin disaster." From the chaotic live-action pantomime of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film to the reliably forgettable string of Uwe Boll productions,
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with watching a film get quietly buried at the box office, especially when that film carries the weight of one of the most beloved fictional worlds ever committed to paper. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrived
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular breed of low-budget independent animation that arrives with almost no fanfare, earns its reputation entirely by word of mouth, and ends up outlasting films that cost a hundred times more to make. On-Gaku: Our Sound is squarely in that company. Based on Hiroyuki Ohashi&
Rating: 3.0★
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has built one of the most distinctive careers in contemporary Japanese cinema, arriving at international recognition on the back of unsettling genre films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) before gradually broadening his scope into quieter, more domestically scaled dramas. To the Ends of the Earth, released in
Rating: 4.0★
Japanese cinema has a long tradition of examining ordinary families under extraordinary pressure, and few directors working today understand that territory better than Hirokazu Kore-eda. Since his early documentaries in the 1990s, Kore-eda has built a body of work concerned with the quiet fractures inside domestic life: children
Rating: 4.0★
There are films that tell you a story and films that place you inside one. Edward Yang's Yi Yi, released in 2000 and running to just under three hours, belongs firmly to the second category. Set across the sprawling, neon-tinged domesticity of Taipei, it follows three generations
Rating: 3.5★
The figure of Yuki-onna, the snow woman of Japanese folklore, has haunted the country's storytelling tradition for centuries. She appears in woodblock prints, Noh theatre, and countless regional variants of the same essential myth: a female spirit of the winter mountains, beautiful, lethal, and possessed of a
Genre Animation
★★★ — Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
Genre Animation
★★★ — Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024)
Genre Documentary
★ — Blue (1993)
Genre Drama
★★★ — The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
Genre Action
★½ — Street Fighter (1994)
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
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