REEL JAPAN
Insights into Japanese cinema and television
Category: Uncategorized
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It’s been a busy year chock full of Japanese productions dropping on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Jme, and elsewhere. Some disappointed, many entertained, and a handful soared to heavenly heights. The following mini reviews are taken from REEL JAPAN’s current and upcoming posts: ASURA Score: 8/10 Director Hirokazu Kore-eda known for his dozen feature films,…
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Limited Series Score: 4/10 Film star Shibasaki Ko remains a reigning queen of Japan’s television dramas. In her early days she co-starred in DR. COTO and GALILEO, as a nurse and police detective, respectively. Most recently she headlined INVISIBLE for the TBS station in 2022, memorably playing a mysterious and dangerous dealer of secrets. In…
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Score: 8/10 Wakamatsu Setsuro’s SNOW ON THE BLADE concerns the fallout from one of the most dramatic incidents in 19th century Japanese history–the assasination of Lord Ii Naosuke by a gang of revolutionaries. A powerful minister from a family who served the Tokugawa shoguns for generations, Lord Ii angered anti-westerners by agreeing to open ports…
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SCORE: 8/10 “Flipping through books so much your fingerprints wear off is a joy.” These words are spoken by a senior editor at the small Tokyo publisher at the center of this story. Based on the novel by Miura Shion, THE GREAT PASSAGE is an inspirational story about men and women who made their life’s…
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SCORE: 10/10 Based on a true story, director Takita Yojiro (DEPARTURES, WHEN THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN) brings us an absorbing biopic about human perseverance and the struggle for science against ignorance and superstition. Okada Junichi turns in one of his finest performances as Santetsu Yasui, a young man living in the late Edo period…
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Limited series Score: 6/10 Strange Instruments of Mercy: A recent mystery series showcasing two young stars of Japanese cinema and television. Like an onion, peeling back its layers will make you cry. Tears of disappointment? Or tears in solidarity to these grieving and resilient characters? I have been looking forward to seeing the female leads,…
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Score: 3/10 Director Yamashita Tomohiko helms an Edo-era heist story that is, at best, an exploration of how poor men under strain of debt turn to thuggery. At worst, it lacks enough substance, stakes, and twists, to justify its passage into cinema. In the hands of a brilliant filmmaking crew, it could have succeeded. However,…
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Score: 5/10 Fittingly for a movie that focuses so much on the 18th century Edo government’s currency policy, IWANE, like a coin, has two sides: On one side, it is a conventional samurai film, shot brightly through modern lenses, with maximum stunt work pitting one style of swordplay against another, featuring a young warrior haunted…
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Score: 7/10 A young man gifted in swordsmanship but short in patience begs his teacher and his lord to allow him to travel to the neighboring domain to study swordsmanship further. Meanwhile, his clan leaders fear the annihilation of their entire domain after years of hiding fields, grain warehouses, and surplus funds from the Shogunate.…
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Limited series Score: 5/10 In this cold case murder mystery, a middle aged cop finds his elder mentor is at the center of the mystery. Further, the cold case once reopened spawns new deaths. Veteran Japanese actor Shibata Kyohei, known for his former onscreen detective persona and numerous guest roles (excellent as the dad in…
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