Article Archives: 2021

Critically maligned, a financial disaster, and dramatically murky -- but dazzling nonetheless, and as a milestone for how CGI functions as its own storytelling medium

Not some genteel life-lessons story, but the quiet plea of a man resisting the growing militarism and reactionary violence of his world

Lopsided, but still very enjoyable; if this hasn't raised the upper bound for anime-to-live-action, it sure has raised the lower bound

Your standard cop-buddy story, made only slightly more interesting by having the buddy being a magic-wielding paladin

A scaled-down adaptation of Sōseki Natsume's dark comedy of human nature as seen through the eyes of a cat, but with all its cutting humor intact

Anyone curious about 'Lupin III' or Hayao Miyazaki's career, start here, as this is a grandly entertaining introduction to both at once

A functionally competent follow-up to the cult classic, but when your ancestor is a cult classic, you want more than just functional follow-up

This off-kilter 1981 comedy about a girl inheriting a crew of not-very-competent yakuza is an oddball masterwork that zags when you think it'll zig

A lavish adult fairytale, now restored in 4K, and featuring a mesmerizing performance by one of Japan's legendary onnagata

When so much cyberpunk dates badly, the futurology of the first 'Ghost In The Shell' TV series remains thrillingly relevant almost twenty years later

Akira Kurosawa's samurai revision of 'King Lear', among the very greatest films ever made, returns to glory in a new 4K remaster

One of the smash hit shows of the year that's both fun to watch and touches on deeper things without getting lost in the weeds

Kei Kumai's chilling film version of Shūsaku Endō's equally grim novel remains all but unseen outside of Japan, but deserves a wider audience despite its queasy subject of wartime culpability

Katsuhiro Otomo's anthology project dazzlingly animates three of his stories, showing more sides to the man most only know through 'AKIRA'

Calling it an anime 'Clash Of The Titans' falls far short; this staggeringly ambitious respinning of Greek mythic adventure is a must-see

A splashy but unmoving look at the last years of Osamu Dazai's dissolute life, with much screen time sensibly devoted to the women he manipulated on the way down

A deeply unappreciated David Lynch-esque jolter, from two major writers of anime live-action adaptations; a horror-feminist project that deserves reexamination with fresh eyes

A classic 1980s Japanese horror effort, a ferocious Dario Argento homage that invents at least as much as it borrows or nods at

Gakuryū Ishii's wild adaptation of the equally wild cult novel is one part 'Gojoe', one part 'Burst City' and two parts Coen Brothers

An attempt to both modernize and partly Westernize Edogawa Rampo's thriller falls flat on both counts

A wildly stylized project that bodes well for future trans-Pacific productions -- but which might have been just as good without being wildly stylized

The first volume in English of this avant-garde feminist figure's work shows her approach to SF and fantasy as personal cultural commentary

Now that we're all wired, whether we like it or not, this cyberpunk urban legend and vaporwave precursor is even creepier and more prescient

Kei Fujiwara's sequel to 'Organ' ends up being more merely unpleasant than unsettling

Kei Fujiwara's symphony of sickness drowns you face-down in its excesses and lingers for a long time to come afterwards

Suehiro Maruo's rendition of Edogawa Rampo's tale of wide-gauge decadence is both delirious and spot-on in its look and feel

Kijū Yoshida's staggering epic of Japanese anarchists Sakae Ōsugi and Noe Ito defies categorization, synopsis, or easy answers

An all-new anime adaptation of Hiroaki Samura's classic long-running manga gets it right at last

Some of the finest animation around, lashed to the mast of a story that goes nowhere

Mamoru Hosoda's weakest film yet, a cloying and sentimental misfire

The latest of Makoto Shinkai's gorgeous films that inevitably end up being about so much less than the sum of their parts