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: 3.0★
Yokohama, 1963. Japan is preparing to host the following year's Olympic Games, a moment freighted with national pride and a quiet, collective desire to draw a line under the devastation of the Second World War. It is into this particular atmosphere of forward momentum and unresolved memory that
Country Japan
I came to Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing with a passing fondness for the sport and left it quietly amazed, both by what these athletes put their bodies through and by how beautifully Erik Shirai has captured it. This is a rich, intimate and genuinely illuminating documentary, one that gets further
Rating: 2.5★
Kamikaze Girls arrived in Japan in the summer of 2004 with considerable momentum behind it, adapted from Novala Takemoto's 2002 novel of the same name, which had already found a devoted readership among the subcultures it affectionately portrays. The novel's world, centred on the Lolita fashion
Rating: 3.5★
Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of those rare figures whose career resists easy summary. A founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that shaped Japanese pop and left fingerprints all over Western synth music in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he went on to become one
Article
No country has given me more pure cinematic pleasure over the years than Japan. It is a national cinema vast enough to contain the greatest samurai epics ever made, the most beloved animated films on the planet, nightmarish horror, tender family drama and wild genre experiments, often all at once.
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that demand you arrive prepared, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion is one of the less apologetic examples of the type. Released in 1997 by the Tokyo animation studio GAINAX, in partnership with Production I.G and Star Child Recording, the film was produced as
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone.
Rating: 3.0★
Japanese cinema at the turn of the millennium was producing some of the most formally adventurous and commercially awkward work anywhere in the world, and The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) sits near the extreme end of that spectrum. It is, on paper, a remake of the South Korean black
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you admire and films you enjoy, and sometimes those two categories barely overlap. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within sits squarely in the first group. I can watch it and feel genuine awe at what they pulled off technically, and then sit back at the end feeling oddly
Rating: 1.0★
A film called Five Dedicated to Ozu invites you, right there in the title, to think of one of cinema's great masters of stillness and quiet contemplation. It is a bold invocation. It is also, I'm sorry to say, one this film has absolutely no business
Rating: 3.5★
The scariest thing in Pulse is almost never the thing you are actually looking at. That is the film's central trick, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa pulls it off with a quiet, devastating patience that most horror directors would struggle to match even once, let alone sustain across a full
Rating: 1.5★
There is a special circle of cinema reserved for the truly botched video-game adaptation, and its patron saint is Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the immortal catastrophe of House of the Dead, still one of the worst films I have ever sat through. I bring him up
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