| Dan Howard | When was the last time you had a really messed up dream? Did you want to just shake it off and forget the dream, or did it pique your curiosity? In the case of both avant-garde and bleak storytelling, it’s speculated that those who are drawn towards… Continue reading
| Ryan Sanderson | Dogra Magra (Toshio Matsumoto, 1988) is a detective story the same way that Radiohead’s King of Limbs is a dance album. Many of the pieces are there, but they’re arranged in a way that will infuriate some and perplex many more. It left me surfing through doctoral theses on… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| Fires on the Plain begins with a literal slap to the face. Cruel, jarring, and just a little bit funny. That’s the energy Kon Ichikawa maintains throughout his bleak and disturbing masterpiece which feels like a cross between Apocalypse Now and Bambi. If a film before 1960 captured Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Author’s note: This essay contains discussions of fictional suicide and real-life suicidal ideation. I. Citalopram On a relatively warm Monday evening last September, while on a short walk to see Kenji Misumi’s Ken at the Trylon, I found myself struggling to cross the street… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| By the start of 1962, Yasujirō Ozu had already directed a staggering 53 feature films that spanned a 33-year journey. With classics like Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959) to lesser-known gems like The Munekata Sisters (1950), the deeper you dive… Continue reading
|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced… Continue reading
|John Moret| The samurai film is, in essence, a very conservative genre in the same realm as the western or horror film. Before you freak out, I don’t mean conservative in terms of politics (though, really…) but in form. The conventional film would witness a ronin finding his honor after losing his way… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know something about One Cut of the Dead. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need me to tell you how special it is, nor would you want me spoiling it. An unassuming genre-bender like this, packed to the gills… Continue reading
|Cole Seidl| Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead has been incredibly, yet quietly, influential since its initial release in Japan in 2017. It has spawned a small independent film movement in Japan known as “nagamawashi” films (or “long take” films) which aim to exploit the… Continue reading
