meta: Drama
2020
'Tokyo Godfathers': Three Vagabonds And A Baby June 23, 2020
Satoshi Kon's most "conventional" movie was also his funniest, a coincidence-driven romp through Tokyo's lower depths
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'Ghost In The Shell: SAC_2045': A Withered Husk May 18, 2020
Easily the weakest 'Ghost In The Shell' project thus far, but with a tease of hope at the end of its first half
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'Lament In The Night': The Voice Of The Issei May 11, 2020
Unknown to English-speaking audiences until now, Shōson Nagahara wrote for fellow Japanese-Americans of their own displaced world and their own broken hearts
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'Beastars': Animal House May 2, 2020
That very rarest of breeds: a truly adult show
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'Giant Robo': The Mecha Opera January 10, 2020
This grand and glorious epic returns to home video for English speaking audiences in a spectacular new Blu-ray Disc edition; it is as essential as it gets
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2019
Junji Ito's 'No Longer Human': No Longer Dazai December 23, 2019
A manga horror icon takes on a classic of modern Japanese literature, and makes it his own in ways both fascinating and baleful
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'Millennium Actress': She Lost It At The Movies December 13, 2019
Satoshi Kon's mini-epic of one woman's journey in film across Japan's turbulent century starts with narrative games, but delves into the ultimate meaning of a person's life
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'Rashōmon': The Post-Truth Condition October 7, 2019
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's story, and Akira Kurosawa's movie, have endured to tell us something about the nature of truth in a time when we can hardly trust the words we hear in our own heads
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'Carole & Tuesday': The Mars Volta September 23, 2019
Shinichiro Watanabe's new series, about two young women trying to make their music their way, either needed more SF or less of it to really work
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'Princess Jellyfish': Girls, Be Ambitious! August 5, 2019
A sly treatise on gender roles and presentation, wrapped in a screwball romantic farce and delivered with great affection
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'Black Lagoon': Boiled Harder June 10, 2019
The animated adaptation of Rei Hiroe's ferocious homage to '80s action and Hong Kong cinema has all the attitude and muscle of its source, and also all its soul and insight
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'The Five Star Stories': In The Year 7575 ... April 15, 2019
This late-1980s anime time capsule is daft but fascinating, if only because it hints at how a new re-adaptation of the same material might really go places
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'One Cut Of The Dead / Kamera o tomeru na!': This Camera Cannot Be Stopped, Ever! March 25, 2019
Not just a love letter to the cinematic underdogs who pull off amazing things with sheer sweat, it is one of those amazing things pulled off with sheer sweat
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'Dororo': Take (Back) Another Little Piece Of My Heart February 5, 2019
Osamu Tezuka's feudal-era supernatural epic manga gives us two antiheroes, mutilated in body and spirit alike, both seeking wholeness
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2018
Sōseki Natsume's 'Kokoro': One Classic, Three Translations December 24, 2018
The great masterwork of modern Japanese fiction, by one of its all-time luminaries, has been translated multiple times, each version its own testament to the complexities of translation as an art
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'A Shameful Life': Osamu Dazai's 'No Longer Human', All Over Again November 26, 2018
An all-new translation of Osamu Dazai's bleak masterwork brings fresh clarity and immediacy to a staple of modern Japanese literature
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'AKIRA' At 30-Something: The Manga At The End Of The World October 16, 2018
On having a reckoning with the god-emperor of modern manga, in a restored English-language edition at last
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'Maborosi': The Unanswerable Question July 27, 2018
Hirokazu Kore-eda's debut feature, twenty years on, remains an ominous and poignant masterwork
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'A Silent Voice': Children Of Lesser Gods June 27, 2018
A gorgeous adaptation of the acclaimed manga, and a story with a hard moral question: Who gets to be redeemed?
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'The Man Who Stole The Sun': I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Now What? June 1, 2018
Almost forty years later, this jet-black comedy about a one-man nuclear terrorist ring remains an absurdist masterwork
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'After The Rain': Two (Broken) Hearts Beat As One April 14, 2018
What starts as an unlikely (and potentially squicky) romance becomes a more ambitious story about kinship between those with buried dreams
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'An Actor's Revenge': Improvised, And Served Cold March 31, 2018
It's normally bad to call a movie 'stagy', but Kon Ichikawa's kabuki tragedy revels in it to great effect
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Kon Ichikawa's 'Kokoro': The Wretched Hearts Of Men March 9, 2018
Kon Ichikawa's 1955 film version of Sōseki Natsume's classic novel adapts it with fidelity, intelligence, and just enough changes to be stimulating
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'your name.': If A Body Meet A Body ... January 26, 2018
Makoto Shinkai's blockbuster is an eyeful and a heartful, but look closely and you'll see the seams
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2017
Natsume Ono's 'not simple': Human Ruins October 20, 2017
The creator of 'ACCA: 13' and 'House Of Five Leaves' also gave us this haunting story of a young man thrown onto life's scrap heap
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