Not Me That Went Viral (俺ではない炎上) (2025)

This book adaptation with a terribly translated English title starts promisingly with a social-media-age update of the Hitchcockian 'wrong man' plot, with Taisuke Yamagata, a fifty-something real estate sales manager, falsely accused of murder by well-meaning but misguided online amateur sleuths, but by the end, the tone has lurched awkwardly between comedy, thriller, and social commentary (isn't online amateur crime reporting terrible?), and the plot has required audiences to at once sympathise with Yamagata as the wronged hero while also regarding him with disdain and pity as a problematic antihero - a difficult balancing act given his portrayal by the likeable Hiroshi Abe.

★★☆☆☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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怪物 (かいふつ) (Monster) (2023)

Hirokazu Kore-eda's drama, again just a smidge too twee, is about people, very young or old, who either throw themselves outside Japan's strict parameters of social propriety or else find themselves pushed outside those lines by circumstance or by others, and billed as a thriller, Kore-eda's movie will keep you guessing who - an arsonist, a drunk, a bully, a domestic abuser, a liar, or a strange elvin sociopath - the real kaibutsu (monster) of the title is, and it could be any number of dead-in-the-eye non-humans who are, the story shows by changing perspectives round and round, so misunderstood and sadly beautiful.

★★★★☆

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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

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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! 

★★★★★

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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.

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★☆☆

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The Forest (2018)

While Japan tries to desensationalise the number of suicides that take place in the Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji so that less people feel encouraged to go there for this purpose and more want to go there as tourists to enjoy its expanses of still, quiet volcanic forest, the likes of Youtuber Logan Paul and the makers of this bad taste 2016 movie (just another relegated to the Netflix dross heap for undiscerning couch potatoes to watch and justify their subscriptions) insensitively turn Japan's grim problem, one attributed not to ghost-fed paranoia but to the country's social austerity, isolation and unemployment, into clickbait.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Wolverine (2013)

The Wolverine slices and dices his way through Japan where it turns out he is best friends since WWII with a Japanese industrialist, in this superhero movie far superior to 2009's X-men Origins: Wolverine, with humorous lines and nicely choreographed action including a spectacular sequence on the roof of a bullet train.

★★★☆☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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Silence (2016)

In the 1600s, Portugese Jesuit priests head to Japan where Christians are being persecuted and one of their own, true-life historical figure Cristovao Ferreira is missing-in-missionary-action, in Martin Scorsese's epic and looong treatment of Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel about the effect Christianity and Japan have on each other.

★★★★☆

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