Japan
Movie Review: Exit 8
4 stars out of 5 Once I got over the disappointment that Exit 8 wasn’t a movie about driving to Hightstown and East Windsor on the New Jersey Turnpike, I really started to enjoy it. I know we’re in an era where an increasing number of motion pictures and TV shows are based on video […]
Movie Review: Evil Does Not Exist
4 stars out of 5 In the past 2.5 years, I’ve quietly become a fan of writer/director Ryûke Hamaguchi. His previous effort, Drive My Car (based on a Haruki Murakami short story), was my favorite film of 2021. And his anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was pretty compelling as well. Now this would […]
Movie Review: Godzilla Minus One
4.5 stars out of 5 It’s the waning days of war in Japan, and Koichi Shikishima is a failed kamikaze pilot; you’d think the situation couldn’t get any worse. Ah, but you forgot about Godzilla, didn’t you? Frankly, no one would blame you. In 1998, the American film conglomerate tried to reboot the big scaly […]
Movie Review: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
3.5 stars out of 5 First things first: Vanna White does not appear in this film. Having just named Drive My Car my favorite movie of 2021, I was excited to see another offering from director Ryûke Hamaguchi. And this time I’d be judging him fully on his own merits, as there wasn’t a Haruki […]
Movie Review: Drive My Car
4.5 stars out of 5When my Golden Books picture book The Christmas Aliens was published in 1998, my friend Dave wrote a joke review on Amazon proclaiming it the “best book since Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase.” I’d never heard of Haruki Murakami but soon picked up that novel and was entranced. Two-plus decades later, […]
Movie Review: The Boy and the Beast
4 stars out of 5 That’s the movie biz for ya: Somebody wins an Oscar for an animated short about a bear, and suddenly everybody’s churning out bear-themed cartoons. Except, this one is feature length, from Japan (anime!), and has dialogue (with English subtitles). Am not entirely sure why I went to see Beauty and […]
Jack Silbert, curator