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: 2.5★
There's a particular kind of embarrassment that comes from rewatching a film you once championed and realising, quietly, that the years have not been kind to it. Casshern is that film for me. Back around its original 2004 release, I was absolutely floored by it. A comic book
Rating: 2.0★
My kids are going through a full-on Pokémon phase at the moment, which means every spare evening involves trading cards, video games, and, apparently, me sitting down to rewatch things I probably should have left well alone. That's how I ended up revisiting Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo
Rating: 3.0★
Here's a confession that probably undermines any claim I have to serious horror credibility: I watched Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring years before I ever sat down with Hideo Nakata's original. The remake absolutely terrified me at the time, burrowed deep into
Rating: 4.0★
There's a particular kind of pressure that surrounds a film like this. When a director of Hayao Miyazaki's stature comes out of retirement, again, to make the film he's apparently been building towards for decades, the weight of expectation is immense. The Boy and
Rating: 3.5★
Let's be honest: when those first official images of Sonic surfaced online, it was one of the most alarming things I'd seen in a cinema preview in years. Those teeth. Those unsettling human-ish eyes. The strange, elongated limbs. I remember thinking there was absolutely no
Rating: 4.0★
I honestly don't understand what went wrong at the box office with this one. Kenji Kamiyama's animated take on Tolkien came and went in late 2024 with barely a ripple, dismissed by critics and ignored by audiences, and I cannot for the life of me work
Rating: 4.0★
I'll be straight with you: the first thing I saw when I looked up On-Gaku: Our Sound was the main character's face, and I genuinely could not tell what was going on with his mouth. This weird, jagged zigzag sitting under his nose that made
Rating: 3.0★
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of those filmmakers I find genuinely hard to stop thinking about. There's a quality to his work, the way he uses deep focus and elongated shots to make you feel something lurking just outside the frame, that keeps pulling me back. Even when a
Raindance Film Festival
Japanese genre cinema has rarely been shy of a wild premise, and Nameless, the 2026 thriller from director Hideo Jojo, arrives with one of the wildest in some time. It had its European premiere at the Raindance Film Festival 2026. The best of these high-concept thrillers understand that a
Rating: 4.0★
There's a moment, fairly early in Monster, where you're absolutely certain you know what kind of film you're watching. You know who the villain is. You know the shape of the injustice. You are, in short, wrong. And the pleasure of Hirokazu Kore-eda&
Rating: 4.0★
There's a scene in Yi Yi where a man performs a simple card trick, and in the space of a few silent gestures, you feel the weight of everything he's never been able to say out loud. No dramatic music swell, no close-up designed to
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in The Snow Woman where the frame holds on a vast white landscape, the silence so complete you can almost feel the cold through the screen, and you know immediately that this film is going to do things its own way. Tokuzo Tanaka isn&
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free