title: Birdy The Mighty

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

A raucous fusion of two genres (SF and comedy), and just like its two main characters, it's a symbiosis, not a collision

Twenty years later, Ryūhei Kitamura's pulp-horror gumbo of Lucio Fulci, Sam Raimi, George Miller, and everything in between remains a micro-budget, J-indie milestone

Gakuryū Ishii's head-on collision between gang-war and punk-rock exploitation pictures still explodes on impact decades later

Half adult OVA of the 90s/00s home-video era, half experimental stop-motion art film, and while not entirely successful it's still worth a look for its low-fi digital aesthetic

Shinya Tsukamoto's dark drama about a medical student obsessed with the cadaver of a lost love becomes a moving meditation on how life and death inform each other

Shinya Tsukamoto's eros-and-thanatos story doesn't always work, but gets an A+ for dazzling effort anyway

Nisioisin's twelve-novel cycle of a 'swordless swordsman' and 'strategemist' on a weapons hunt is, in its English edition, a gold standard for how to translate cutting-edge cultural properties

A real delight: a smart, fleet-footed story inspired by classic con-man comedies, and with correspondingly more to bring to the table than other anime