After The Storm (2016)

One evening, I was looking for something soothing and gentle for a movie, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After The Storm (2016; Umi yori mo Mada Fukaku) worked its charms on me. I’ve only seen Kore-eda’s Shoplifters and that had me bawling at the end, with its displays of human kindness and compassion in an unjust world. […]

Paprika (2006)

Look, I can rewatch Inception anytime, but after my first viewing at the cinema, I remembered thinking, “The imagery wasn’t really that surreal for a movie about dreams.” Sure, there’s the city folding on itself, and the hallway zero gravity fight, but for the most part, it’s pretty standard stuff – the climax is a […]

First Love (2019)

First Love (2019; Hatsukoi) combines a couple of my favourite sub-genres: One Wild Night and Multiple Parties Want One Thing. Directed by the prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike (13 Assassins, Blade Of The Immortal), we follow a young boxer Leo (Masataka Kubota) who goes from shiftless to despondent when he receives some bad news after […]

Evil Of Dracula (1974)

Evil Of Dracula (1974; Chi o Sū Bara) is a Japanese cinematic riff on the Hammer Horror formula. It’s your basic Dracula story, this time imagined as taking place in an all-girls residential college out in the countryside. A new hunky psychology teacher, Professor Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa) arrives by train and becomes acquainted with the […]

Godzilla (1954)

I have this vague memory as a kid, reading that the original Godzilla (1954; aka Gojira) was on SBS during the day, maybe a weekend, and trying to watch it, feeling bored by the black and white footage and tired of waiting for the monster to show up. How wrong I was. Watching Godzilla in […]