Godzilla Minus One (2023)

"Godzilla looks really ticked off," a naval officer says at one point, and it is funny because in this 37th Godzilla movie in 2023 the kaiju is still a stiff, rather rubbery, frozen-faced stare-bear - it doesn't matter if he has taken gunfire to the face, swallowed a mine, or been plunged over 1,500 metres to the bottom of the ocean, the demented grin persists - but everything else in Godzilla Minus One, which takes the series back to its roots and presents Godzilla as nuclear annihilation itself, is elaborately, effectively staged, from the razed-to-zero post-Second World War Japan setting to the big-budget Jurassic Park-style chomps and stomps.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Exit 8 (2025)

The computer game it is based on is a simple spot-the-difference game, but this movie adaptation starring the charismatic Ninomiya Kazunari expands the premise into something at times disturbing and often profoundly moving, turning the main world-weary character's struggle to find Exit 8 in an underground train station in Japan into an analogy for stepping up, taking a stand against, and refusing to ignore life's anomalies - no easy task anywhere, but especially in consensus-driven Japan, and particularly resonant in light of recent scandals involving Fuji TV and Johnny and Associates, and more broadly in this age of male reckoning.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Perfect Days (2023)

It is Groundhog Day but backwards, with this Japanese 'Phil', Hirayama, living what appears to be a perfectly contented day over and over, cleaning Tokyo toilets and pausing occasionally to admire light through trees, wood grain, or reflected colour, but upheaval eventually arrives as director Wim Wenders throws unexpected encounters at this toilet cleaner, highlighting the delicate balance between the uncomplaining endurance demanded by Japanese society and an individual's private contentment in the detail of a dazzling impermanence. 

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Inugami Family (犬神家の一族) (1976)

Seishi Yokomizo's murder mystery is set in motion by the death of a rich patriarch whose unusual will plummets his extended Inugami family into conflict, and when the bodies start turning up in grisly giallo fashion, Kindaichi Kousuke,  Yokomizo's recurring detective, a vagabond with dandruff (!), must race to unmask a murderer in a plot that, as always with Yokomizo, involves a thousand similarly named characters, centuries of buried family history, and complicated - and here, really, frankly, impossible - characters' comings and goings from busy murder scenes.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) (Eight Tomb Village)(1996)

Seishi Yokomizo's mystery novel, encompassing 1577 civl war events, a spree killing in the 1930s (inspired by a horrible true event), and then a more contemporary village murder mystery, is a convoluted mess (on top of these occasions of mass murder spread over 400 years, there's portentous lightning strikes, identical twins, hidden treasure, mummified bodies, a labyrinth, madness, a curse, and village unrest) and while director Ichikawa Kon's 1996 remake sticks more closely to the plot of the book than the 1977 adaptation, it still makes the sensible choice to cut some fat off the book's bones, presenting an enjoyable mystery less convoluted than the book, downplaying the horror of the 1977 version and up-playing the English mystery elements, injecting into the mystery much more of Kindaichi Kousuke, the private detective, who is trying to discover who is poisoning the residents of "Eight Tomb Village" while also investigating how the murders are related to the arrival in town of handsome Tatsuya Tajimi, a young man just told he is heir to the enormous Tajimi fortune.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

しんぼる ('Symbol') (2009)

This very funny oddity jumps back and forth between two disparate situations - an aged Mexican wrestler gears up for a bout as his family races to attend and, in a completely separate absurdist fantasy, a man-child wakes inside a white cube and finds he has no means of escape but there are a large number of cherubs' penis buttons dotted around the room that, when pushed, dispense food and other random objects.....really.

★★★☆☆ for the wrestler story

★★★★☆ for the absurd comedy

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Ten to sen (aka 'Points and Lines' or 'Point and Line') (点と線) (1958)

Seiichi Matsumoto's mystery, a mere slip of a book written in the spare style of Simenon, is in some ways the counter to Hitchcock's A Lady Vanishes - instead of disappearing from a train, here one character steadfastly appears on one while detectives suspect he was elsewhere - but to say more would ruin the surprise of both the book and this faithful 1958 adaptation that opens with a Vertigo-style animated journey across the points and lines of a train map set to a jaunty discordant thriller score, barrels like an express train through its mystery, and ends with a solution to an impossible crime as ingenious as it is simple, hinging on a trick that is uniquely Japanese - there'll never be a Western adaptation! 

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Island of Hell (aka 'Devil's Island', 'Gokumon-tou', 'Hell's Gate Island' (獄門島) (1977)

Ichikawa Kon's 1977 adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel is faithful to the book except in its final moments when whodunnit is revealed and it is whodidntdunnit in the book, a change which will rankle fans of the classic mystery featuring the recurring, dandruff-suffering, scruffy detective Kindaichi Kousuke; meanwhile, non-Japanese speakers also will be frustrated by breakneck cutting, which makes it hard to enjoy the movie's Japanese sets, costuming, and its plot while also keeping up with lightning-speed subtitles. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009)

When its master dies, leaving it to run free, a Japanese Akita called Hachi takes up residence at a train station, where everyone assumes it is showing extreme loyalty to its deceased master, but it's easy to cynically flip this otherwise pleasant story - based on the 1920s real-life dog, Hachiko - into a tale of animal neglect, seeing the dog's choice to squat at the station as the result of its having been turfed out by uncaring family, made to sit through rain, hail, or shine in the only place anybody will feed and pet him...sorry.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005)

This melodrama, a Chinese production, has an older Japanese man, an emotionally detached fisherman, travelling to China with a hare-brained scheme to reunite with his dying son - his misguided and really only completely self-serving actions cause enormous trouble to everyone he encounters including Japanese-speaking tour guides, Chinese village leaders and townsfolk, Government officials, prison wardens and staff and prisoners, and they in return go to so much trouble for him - ridiculous amounts of trouble - that you have to wonder in the end if this infuriating, humorous, and emotional story from director Zhang Yimou really means to pull your heartstrings or comment on a cultural difference.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ramen Teh (情牽拉麵茶) (aka 'Ramen Shop') (2018)

A Japanese kid, the son of a ramen shop owner, heads to Singapore to investigate his mother's estrangement from her Singaporean-Chinese mother (his grandmother) and in the process, embarks on a culinary tour that equips him with the skills to bridge not just culinary but also familial divides and historically entrenched cultural rifts.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Third Murder (三度目の殺人) (Sandome no Satsujin) (2017)

Where his past films have been about family (shinkansen umbilical cords, absent mothers and fathers, and crime-family surrogates) Director Hirokazu Kore-eda surprises here, turning his attention to a legal procedural, but as the murder trial progresses and as lawyer Shigemori works hard to get at the truth behind his murder suspect client's lies, issues of familial connection again come to the fore as Shigemori's relationship with his daughter, a murder victim's relationship with his daughter, and a suspect's relationship with his daughter all speak to what's inside, if anything, the relationship Japan's hulking, self-interested and image-conscious legal system has with those caught up in it.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Door Into Summer (夏への扉 キミのいる未来へ) (2021)

Robert A Heinlein's 1956 science fiction novel is turned here into an unhurried Japanese 'heartful' drama mixed with madcapped and madly paced science fiction of a distinctly "Back To The Future" kind (replete with a mad professor in a white coat screaming about there being no time to lose to a bewildered kid in a orange/red puffer jacket) but the two elements - sloooow heartful drama and zany science fiction -  do not sit well together, plus the sight of the pretty-J-boy hero turning to booze, swigging from a flask, or the cat-hating J-femme fatale "letting go" and becoming a hideous Jabba the Hut draws unintended laughs, detracting from the scifi adventure.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Grudge (2004)

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on horror series, until now wholly Japanese productions, continues with this third movie, high on spooky atmosphere but low on sense, that casts Americans Sarah Michelle Gellar and Bill Paxton in the lead roles of a story - something about a curse that makes children blue and wide-eyed, that makes dead bodies appear and/or disappear, and sees the dead spiritually tethered to the places of their death but then also free to visit people at work or at home - don't ask too many questions.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Gamera VS Viras (ガメラ対宇宙怪獣バイラス) (US: Destroy All Planets) (1968)

My first encounter with Gamera, the beloved icon from Japan's long-running kaiju movie series, was watching this 1968 movie, the fourth, that pits the fire-breathing turtle-with-a-frozen-stare against a fidgetspinner from outerspace with a bumblebee paint job; the incoherent monster battles that make up a bulk of the movie's ninety-one minutes entertain on account of their rudimentary but serviceable special effects, but you'll want to experience them with the tv muted — kaiju battles make nails down a blackboard sound positively melodic.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Forest of Love (あいなき森で叫べ) (2019)

What was perhaps intended here was a Japanese Memories of Murder or, given the violence and bold yellow timestamps that punctuate the film, something Tarantino-esque, but director Sion Sono takes his subject matter, the depraved and deeply disturbing real-life crimes of Matsunaga Futoshi and his spouse Junko Ogata and wallows in their every minute horrific detail, and then, perhaps recognising how unedifying, how unrewarding it all is, asks his audience to instead be interested in a second, more-than-highly-unlikely case of serial murder that bookends the gore - and that convolution comes with a loooooooong and irrelevant backstory of lesbian love during a high school production of Romeo and Juliet, nothing to do with Matsunaga, so turns to nonsense whatever lofty aspirations, if any, Sono had in mind.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Devotion of Suspect X (嫌疑人X的献身) (2017)

The 2017 Chinese film version of Keigo Higashino's bestselling thriller - the one in which a crime-busting physicist and his childhood friend, a maths professor whom we know did it, face off in a Furuhata Ninzaburo...alright, Columbo...style game of cat-and-mouse, is more The Devotion of Suspect Zzzzz, a movie zapped of the book's energy due to the absence of character backstories and Japanese context and further dampened by the exaggerated performances of the two leads: a repugnant Yukawa (here "Tang Chuan"), whose smugness is laid on as thick as his concealer, and a narcotised Ishigami (here "Shi Hong"), whose maths brilliance has been replaced with chronic fatigue.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS