Third Window Films
Blu-Ray Review: Adrift in Tokyo
If you’re based outside of Japan, you might naturally assume that the culture is dominated by manga, anime, overwrought historical dramas and young adult fiction. While this is true, to an extent, there’s often much more interesting fare bubbling just under the surface. Most of it never seems to travel but, when films do appear …
Blue-Ray Review: Summer Time Machine Blues
What would you do if you invented a time machine? The answer is likely to be different depending on the individual. Some, selfishly, would go back and use their knowledge to become incredibly rich and famous. Or change events from their own lives, to erase those bad decisions. Others. with a more altruistic bent, would …
Film Review – Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
Wars are never straightforward. The bigger the conflict, both in terms of length and size of the arena of battle, the messier things like logistics and communications become. The Pacific theatre during World War II is a prime example. fighting took place across countless islands, big and small, scattered across the ocean. Groups easily became …
Blu-ray Review: 9 Souls
There’s nothing that captures the imagination of the viewing public quite like a prison break drama. Some of the most popular films of all time have been based around this central premise. The likes of The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape from Alcatraz and The Rock are all great examples of what the sub-genre …
Blu-ray Review: Gemini
Japan is home to the weird, the wonderful and the worrying. It’s probably no surprise that such a traditionally rigid and regimented society has proved to be a catalyst for some of the most creative and audacious art. When it comes to the extreme and the imaginative, very few directors can match Shinya Tsukamoto. Most …
Fantasia Film Review: Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats
From the outside, it can seem like cinema and television in Japan are dominated by samurais, Manga adaptations, limp romantic comedies and period dramas. However, there’s a weird and often wonderful independent cinema industry lurking just out of sight. It has produced some great films like The Taste of Tea, Fish Story, Hula Girls and …
Blu-Ray Review: Hanagatami
Film-making is a strange vocation. Unlike music, where your first album is often the culmination of a lifetimes’ work, directors can make film after film before bringing their pet project to fruition. It can become an obsession, which consumes and sometimes defeats. More often than not the end result is a disappointment. Terry Gilliam’s attempt …
Film Review: One Cut of the Dead
It’s all too easy to be overly critical and forget how incredibly difficult it is to make a feature film. How much time and effort is invested by a whole host of people to make it happen. The venture itself is a mammoth task with so many risks, dependencies and critical success factors that it’s …
Blu-ray Review: Dangan Runner
Today, streaming has become the norm and is beginning to challenge the mainstream cinematic experience. Whilst this creates a problem by preventing audiences seeing a film as the director intended, in a cinema, it affords those films excluded from theatrical releases a chance. In many ways it’s history repeating. Straight-to-video is now straight-to-stream. In Japan, …
Blu-Ray Review: The Whispering Star/The Sion Sono
Sion Sono must be one of the hardest working directors currently ploughing his own unique and occasionally unwanted furrow in Japanese cinema. His films are usually, without fail, loud, brash, confrontational and unsettling. He revels in bright colours, bloodshed and a taste for the perverse. All these factors make his new film so unexpected and …