Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo, 2025)

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The Detective Chinatown team head back to turn of the contrary San Francisco in the latest instalment of the mega hit franchise, Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Tángtàn 1900). Like many recent mainstream films, its main thrust is that Chinese citizens are only really safe in China, but also implies that diaspora communities exist outside the majority population and therefore can only rely on each other. Nevertheless, there’s something quite uncanny in the film’s ironic prescience as racist politicians wax on about how here rules are made by the people rather than an emperor and plaster “make America strong again” banners on their buses. 

The crime here though is the murder of a young white woman, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), the daughter of Senator Grant (John Cusack) who is attempting to push the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act through government and destroy all the Chinatowns in the United States. An older Native American man was also found dead alongside her. Some have attributed the crime to Jack the Ripper as Alice was mutilated before she died and some of her organs were taken. The son of local gangster Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Zhenbang (Zhang Xincheng), is quickly arrested for the crime while his father hires Qin Fu (Liu Hairan) to exonerate him believing Qin Fu to be Sherlock Holmes. 

What Qin Fu, an expert in Chinese medicine recently working as an interpreter for the famous consulting detective, finds himself mixed up in is also a slow moving revolution as it turns out Zhenbang is involved with the plot to overthrow the Qing dynasty (which would finally fall in 1912). As the film opens, corrupt courtiers to sell off large golden Buddha statues to American “allies” who are later seen saying that they plan to fleece China and then renege on their promises to protect it. Meanwhile, the Dowager Empress has sent emissaries to San Francisco to take out the revolutionaries in hiding there including Sun Yat-sen.

Of course, in this case, the Qing are the bad guys that were eventually overthrown by brave Communist revolutionaries that paved the way for China of today which is alluded to in the closing scenes when Zhenbang’s exiled friend Shiliang (Bai Ke) says that China will one day become the most powerful country in the world implying that no-one will look down on the Chinese people again. But on the other hand, they are still all Chinese and so the emissary tells Qin Fu to “Save China” as he lays dying having met his own end shortly after hearing that the British have invaded Peking signalling the death blow for the Qing dynasty. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of irony in the fact that the secondary antagonist is an Irish gang who have signs reading “no dogs, no Chinese,” mimicking those they themselves famously face. The Irish gang is in league with Grant and content to do his dirty work, while Bai is supported by another prominent man who speaks Mandarin and pretends to be a friend to the Chinese but in reality is against the Exclusion Act on the grounds he wants to go on being able to exploit cheap Chinese labour. In this iteration, Ah Gui (Wang Baoqiang) is “Ghost,” a man whose parents were killed building the American railroad and was subsequently taken in and raised by a Native American community. In Bai’s final confrontation with the authorities, he takes them to task for their hypocrisy reminding them how important the Chinese have been in building the society in which they alone are privileged while “equality” does not appear to extend to them.

Through reinforcing these messages of prejudice and exploitation, the film once again encourages Chinese people living abroad to return home. Though set in 1900, the scenes of protest can’t help but echo those we’ve seen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic when racist hatred towards Asian communities has become much more open and pronounced. Qin Fu and Ghost do at least succeed in solving the mystery through scientific principles while ironically assisted by an earnest American policeman who says he thinks it’s important to uphold the law even as we can see the head of the golden Buddha sitting behind the victorious politician’s banquet table and realise that in reality taking out Grant has made little difference for the Exclusion Act will still be renewed (it was repealed only in 1943). They may have saved Chinatown, but Bai must sacrifice his American wealth and return to China much the way he left it having reflected on his life in light of the revolutionary course charted by his more earnest son. As Ghost and Qin Fu remark, if things were better there no one would want to come here though they themselves apparently elect to stay, solving more crimes and making sure that their descendants know they were here and where they were from.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

The Village (ヴィレッジ, Michihito Fujii, 2023)

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The toxicity of life in small-town Japan is manifested in a giant recycling plant in Michihito Fujii’s poetic drama, The Village (ヴィレッジ). Closely aligned with the noh play quoted in the opening title card, the film charts a young man’s simultaneous blossoming and corruption as he finds himself at the service of a demonic mayor and fighting for his place in a village that doesn’t need him but requires a sacrifice. 

In the opening scenes, mist rises over the mountain accompanied by noh recitation before we eventually arrive at a noh recital. These two images would seem to signal a kind of innate Japaneseness which has been corrupted by the presence of the recycling plant despite the economic benefits it’s brought to the area. The mayor, and boss of the plant, Ohashi (Arata Furuta), wants to extend it out across the other mountains in the region and boasts that though there may have been resistance at first now everyone is grateful to them for everything they’ve done for the village. 

Yu’s (Ryusei Yokohama) father was the last holdout against the plant and apparently ended up killing a man in an altercation thereafter taking his own life and burning down their family home. Because of the stigma surrounding his father’s actions, Yu has been ostracised by his community and is used as a perpetual kicking bag not least by Ohashi’s thuggish son Toru (Wataru Ichinose) at his job at the plant. His mother has also turned to drink and developed a pachinko problem which has resulted in massive debts to yakuza loanshark Maruoka (Tetta Sugimoto) who’s press-ganged Yu into working at the illegal dumpsite which is how the plant really makes its money.

But his life begins to change when childhood friend Misaki (Haru Kuroki) returns to the village having apparently suffered a breakdown in Tokyo. Misaki’s resurfacing reinforces the purgatorial atmosphere as if everyone here were already dead. Having been away so long, only she immediately embraces Yu and simultaneously bonds with him in their outsider status. Encouraging him at work and at home, Yu gradually becomes more confident but equally dependent on the plant for his newfound status. When he’s suggested as the host of a TV documentary some of the locals object given his family background, but in contrast to his father’s opposition Yu is slowly seduced by the plant and the new life it offers him which seems almost too good to be true like a dream he is sure to be awoken from. In this, he mimics the man in the noh play who falls asleep in an inn and is transported to a world in which he is an emperor. He lives there happily for 50 years only to wake up again back in the inn and realise that really life is just a dream. 

Misaki hands him back his noh mask as means of separating himself from the world around him. She says that it forces you to confront yourself, and also perhaps implies a deeper connection with an idealised vision of pre-modern Japan uncorrupted by the greed and cynicism of a man like Ohashi who claims that “position is all that matters.” Toru had told Yu that the village didn’t need him, Misaki and Ohashi say it does though for different reasons. Yet Ohashi darkly suggests that it also needs a sacrfice, and in an odd way just as his father before him it may be Yu who sacrifices himself even at the cost of his idealised life. His encroaching cynicism is directly contrasted with the idealism of Misaki’s younger brother Keiichi (Ryuto Sakuma) who like he once was is meek and diffident yet certain in his idealism and unwilling to along with the lies and wrongdoing that increasingly define village life. Eventually, he leaves the village altogether.

Yu meanwhile achieves his destiny in bringing things full circle, conducting a kind of purification ritual that aims to rid the village of Ohashi’s corruption as symbolised by the giant rubbish tip which is slowly consuming the landscape. Yu’s problem was that he tried to make his life on top of all this filth and toxicity only to realise what the price of that new life might be. Conjuring the strange and oppressive atmosphere of small-town life where past is always present and petty prejudices die hard, Fujii spins a poetic tale of fatalism and redemption amid the misty mountains and ancient chants of a slowly dying village.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Bloody Shuriken (赤い手裏剣, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1965)

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A cynical ronin spots a business opportunity when he rides into a town beset by gangsters in Tokuzo Tanaka’s samurai western, Bloody Shuriken (赤い手裏剣, Akai Shuriken). Despite the name, this is not a ninja movie. The title refers to the knives the hero throws with almost supernatural skill. Adapted from a short story by noir master Haruhiko Oyabu, the action may sound reminiscent of Yojimbo but there’s a different kind of irony in its humour and a lightheartedness to its cynicism even if its final message is that the wages of greed are death.

We can tell that Ibuki (Raizo Ichikawa) is both good man and bad in that he immediately breaks up a fight between rival gangs on entering town, depriving the men in question of their money, but then handing it straight to the owner of the bar they were fighting in to cover the damage. He’s concerned about his horse too, but can’t quite afford the lodging fees at the stable run by the grumpy Yuki (Chitose Kobayashi) who loathes samurai, and with good reason. After hearing about the complicated makeup of the town’s hierarchy, Ibuki decides to stay and make some money by essentially playing each of the three gang leaders off against each other so they end up taking care of themselves. 

So far, so Yojimbo. But this town seems to be even further out, much more like a decrepit western outpost filled with scum and villainy. When the wind picks up, the dust blows through as if signalling the murky air and sense of futility. We’re told that the leader of the biggest gang, Hotoke (Isao Yamagata), is also the police chief, while his rival Sumiya (Yoshio Yoshida) complains that he’s usurped his position as his family has been there longer. Hotoke arrived a starving man three years previously and got back on his feet thanks to the support of the community, but then he turned around and got rich running a gambling den targeting local miners. Kinuya (Fujio Suga) has been here a little longer, but is otherwise biding his time until the other gangs fall from grace.

Of course, Ibuki foments conflict and strikes deals with all of them, but the real trouble is some missing gold that was stolen from the government causing even more disruption in the town with inspectors targeting ordinary people who weren’t even involved. Bar owner Chinami (Masumi Harukawa) is one of many interested in finding out what happened to the money, but she’s also in a precarious position, on the one hand throwing her lot in with Hotoke but on the other hating him and approaching both Ibuki and moody ronin Masa (Koji Nanbara ) to help her be free of the troublesome gangster. 

The fact that the two most prominent business owners are women is perhaps uncomfortably intended to signal the breakdown of the town in which Ibuki becomes the only real “proper” man amid bumbling gangsters and crazed ronin. Yet Chinami is directly contrasted with the pure and innocent Yuki who hates all the gangsters, as well as the samurai and generally everyone who isn’t a horse. Cynical and greedy, Chinami wants the gold and she’s prepared to use her body to manipulate men into doing what she wants, whereas Yuki defiantly keeps her head down and refuses to participate in gangster nonsense because she just wants to run her stables in peace. Only later does she develop a fondness for Ibuki on realising that he’s not so cynical after all and is interested in a kind of justice and getting rid of the corruption in the town for reasons other than money. Having discovered the location for the gold, he leaves the knowledge to Yuki so she can avenge her father who was killed during the robbery. 

But in other ways, this is already a post-apocalyptic hellscape as Ibuki discovers on spotting a pair of crows feeding on a corpse in a river. Perhaps taking pity on one less fortunate than himself, he throws one of his darts and skewers them. Ibuki’s knife supply seems to be inexhaustible, and he never appears to go back and retrieve the ones he’s thrown though his skill does seem to lend him an almost supernatural quality. In any case, Tanaka injects a degree of weird humour in the strange town with its eccentric residents including ronin Masa who looks permanently evil yet has a strange love of dolls, while the fight scenes themselves are often somewhat comical as the gangs seem to clash like a pair of cats slapping each other. There’s even something quite funny about the way the film bluntly drops exposition at unexpected moments even in the midst of the farcical scheming between the gangsters and Ibuki running back and forth to stoke the fires of conflict. This land is so bleak, it seems to say, all you can do is laugh or you’ll end up face down in a river with crows picking at your back too, so you might as well ride off into the sunset like Ibuki looking for the next corrupt town to purify and onward towards the bounty on the horizon. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Troll Factory (댓글부대, Ahn Gooc-jin, 2024)

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The modern world is so confusing that it’s become almost impossible to discern what is objectively “real” from what is merely currently held public opinion. Sometimes what is actually true sounds like a conspiracy theory, or maybe that’s just what they want you to think. In any case, most of us are already aware of the danger lurking behind cynically employed terms such as “fake news,” and that our perspectives are increasingly manipulated by dubious sources with their own agendas we are continually unaware of. 

Yet is Sang-jin (Son Suk-ku) the journalistic hero of Ahn Gooc-jin’s Troll Factory (댓글부대, Daetguelbudae) already too far down the rabbit hole to be able to see the light? He’s fond of saying that “the path of a journalist is dark and lonely, but his courage changes the world,” while simultaneously admitting the “thrill” of leaking a secret that no one else knows. It’s possible he’s over romanticised his role in events and is reading more into things than is really there because at the end of the day he wants to believe which obviously leaves him dangerously open to manipulation.

In some ways, he starts his story with a more positive framing explaining that the first candlelight protests took place in the early days of the internet so they weren’t able to get the information out there fast enough to attract large enough crowds to make a difference while approximately a third of the entire population turned out in 2017 and got President Park Geun-hye impeached. Of course, that’s only good news if you’re on the same side as the protestors, and Sang-jin increasingly hints that the internet has been bought up by big business which obviously wouldn’t be. Sang-jin has a particular bugbear with a company named Manjun that was forced to offer a public apology for its corrupt business practices which were exposed thanks to the protests against the government scandal. He’s suckered into writing an article exposing them to help a small IT company that says Manjun scuppered its attempts to win a government contract then poached its employees and stole its technology.

Though Sang-jin is able to publish the piece, Manjun refute it and cast doubt on the CEO’s evidence. Sang-jin is relentlessly trolled online and the CEO takes his own life with many blaming Sang-jin for allowing him to face this kind of harassment because of his own petty vendetta against Manjun and desire for journalistic glory. Yet the young man who comes to him with another story that he was employed by Manjun to run extreme PR and harassing campaigns online may not be so different in that one of their targets also took her own life after being humiliated on the internet. They were hired to get her father to stop his one man protest against the defamation laws by pushing her into suing the people trolling her. Sadly she made a much more final decision, but her father did stop protesting so technically they still achieved their goal. 

As he later says, truth mixed with lies feels more real than the actual truth. It doesn’t seem implausible that a large corporation would be doing this sort of thing. It’s not unheard of that people are paid to write product reviews for products they’ve never used or to write negative reviews of a rival business to cause them reputational damage. It stands to reason that they’d be briefing against their enemies online and trying to mitigate any negative energy by manipulating public opinion. We’ve seen this done demonstrably with bots during elections. But Sang-jin still can’t seem to critically inspect his sources and never really stops to wonder if the young man opposite him in an otherwise empty coffee shop is making all this up just to troll him personally, or in fact from the conspiracy theorist’s perspective, to permanently discredit him so that his criticisms of Manjun will never be given any credence. 

In the end, it’s him that seems like a crank resorting to posting lengthy rants on the internet because the respectable papers won’t trust him anymore now that all his scoops have been discredited. Is he right that Manjun and possibly others are running large scale “Public Opinion Task Forces” or Troll Factories online, or did he just get trolled himself and can’t let it go? In the opinion of some, he is now the troll peddling his conspiracy theories online and craving the attention of going viral with another sensationalist story. But even if not all of it’s true, that doesn’t mean it’s all lies and Sang-jin maybe onto something even if it’s just that the internet make trolls of us all as we become lost in the infinitely confusing labyrinth of what is objectively “true” and what merely a convenient lie to serve those who are in “reality” already in power or simply would wish to be. 

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Albino (アルビノ, Toru Kamei, 2016)

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Two women struggle to free themselves from the abuses of a patriarchal and conservative society in Toru Kamei’s tragic lesbian romance, Albino (アルビノ). Though perhaps somewhat out of touch in its tacit implication that same sex love is inherently destructive, Kamei’s sensitive drama finds its marginalised heroines seeking mutual rescue but finding only temporary respite in the bubble of their love fraught as it is with danger and confusion as they each in their own way struggle to escape their respective prisons literal and self imposed. 

Butch plumber Yashima (Fujiko) has always felt somewhat ill at ease, that her inside doesn’t match her out, and the disconnect has made her reluctant to associate with others. On a job one day she encounters a strange young woman, Kyu (Satsuki Maue), wearing a high school uniform who can’t seem to stop gazing at her. Yashima fixes the problem with her sink which was clogged with paper tissue, but is surprised when Kyu calls back and says it happened again. On her return visit, while Kyu’s stepfather is out, Kyu asks Yashima to have a look at the bathroom where she gingerly seduces her, both women perhaps surprised by the depth of their desire. Problematic age gap aside, the two women embark on a passionate sexual affair but struggle to free themselves from the forces which constrain them outside of their intense physical connection. 

Hinting at a kind of gender dysphoria, Yashima lives as a man but feels pressured into conforming to conventional femininity. She’s the only woman at her job as a plumber, perhaps still stereotypically regarded as a male occupation, and simultaneously regarded as one of the boys made complicit in the misogynistic banter of her boss and colleague. Resented for her unwomanliness, she’s eventually assaulted by her skeevy vanmate who refuses to believe her when she says she has no interest in men. She implies that prior to her relationship with Kyu, she hadn’t considered other women but had perhaps thought of herself as male, and is immediately overwhelmed by her newfound desire. Meanwhile, she’s also dealing with familial trauma in her difficult relationship with her alcoholic mother who frequently turns up only to ask for money to spend on drink. 

Kyu, meanwhile, is more directly oppressed, trapped in an abusive environment with violent stepfather who repeatedly rapes her, his tissues the ones which eventually clog the sink after she tries to wash them away. She claims that the uniform is a fashion statement, though the implication seems to be that her stepfather does not allow her out of the house even to go to school if indeed she is still a student despite her claims to the contrary. That might also explain why she continues to clog the sink and call the plumber, potentially alerting Yashima’s boss not to mention the colleague who seems to have realised there’s something going on, rather than simply ring her directly even after she’s really only coming for sex. Kyu makes a habit of giving Yashima hard candies after each of their meetings, Yashima eventually realising that they spell out the word “help”, but she remains too traumatised to escape convinced that her stepfather would find her wherever they went. 

Somewhat awkwardly, the implication is that Yashima’s relationship with Kyu is the force which motivates her to accept her femininity, the younger woman transgressively kissing her after staining her lips with menstrual blood as if to ram the point home. Kyu meanwhile agrees that she too hates being a woman, though her resentment is perhaps more towards her constant victimisation, her utter powerlessness at the hands of the hands of the stepfather who abuses her and whom she cannot escape. Yashima too finds herself victimised as a woman, assaulted by her colleague who leaves by coldly telling her it was her own fault for refusing him, or perhaps simply for her “failure” to conform to conventional social norms, a crime for which he has punished her as means of correction. Yet they each struggle to free themselves, Kyu too traumatised to embrace her freedom despite her literal cry for help, while Yashima is continually punished for her atypical gender presentation. Only in sex do they find release. Shot with a detached realism which extends to the naturalistic though passionate, erotic love scenes Kamei’s melancholy drama offers little in the way of hope for either woman, subtly suggesting that their romance is a forlorn hope because there is no escape from the forces which oppress them in such a rigid and conformist society. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Eleven Samurai (十一人の侍, Eiichi Kudo, 1967)

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“If no one denounces the absurdity of this world, then our descendants will keep suffering,” a soon-to-be ronin insists in Eiichi Kudo’s revengers tragedy, Eleven Samurai (十一人の侍, Juichinin no Samurai). It seems clear from the outset that their actions will have little effect no matter whether they succeed or fail because the enemy is feudalism which may be approaching the end of its life but is definitely not dead yet. They can at least attempt to avenge their clan even if they can’t save it while refusing to let an entitled, selfish lord get away doing whatever he likes just because he happens to be the son of the former shogun and brother of the current one.

The opening scenes see Nariatsu (Kantaro Suga) chasing a deer having declared himself a “real hunter”. He ignores the cries of his men to watch where he’s going and sails over the border into the territory of Oshi which amounts to an invasion seeing as he is armed and has no permission to be there. The deer gets away, but Nariatsu shoots an old woodcutter whom he felt to be in his way with his bow and arrow. The Lord of the Abe clan that rules Oshi immediately takes him to task and tells Noriatsu that his behaviour is unbecoming for the son of the former shogun. He’s committed a murder in their territory, but they’re prepared to let it go as long as he leaves as soon as possible. But Nariatsu doesn’t like being told what to do and simply shoots the lord in the eye, potentially sparking a diplomatic incident. 

The Abe clan try to lodge a complaint in Edo, but are shut down by courtier Mizuno (Kei Sato) who fears that to acknowledge an event such as this would damage the moral authority of the Tokugawa regime. He decides to cover the whole thing up by claiming it was the Abe clan who insulted Noriatsu. The Abe clan will then be dissolved, and Oshi essentially gets nationalised. All of which suits Nariatsu just fine because he wants to take control of Oshi and expand his territory anyway. Part of his petulance seems to stem from the fact that he feels hard done by with such a small inheritance when his brother became the Shogun and received multiple fiefdoms. The previous Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyoshi, had produced an unusual number of children which became quite a problem in that he had to find lands for them all and eventually hastened the demise of the shogunate because of the additional strain. 

But Nariatsu is also an overgrown child who has no idea how to do anything for himself and no concern for the feelings or fortunes of others. When instructed to do something he doesn’t want to, Nariatsu petulantly stamps his feet and complains, and when his actions are challenged he simply replies that he’ll be telling his father. In fact, he is so infuriating that it’s likely most of his men secretly want him dead too, including his chief adviser Gyobu (Ryutaro Otomo) who was once the General Inspector but is now expected to babysit this absolute buffoon. Even though Nariatsu knows the Abe clan will be trying to kill him, he still sneaks out to the red light district and gets blind drunk with geisha which in itself is conduct unbecoming for a high ranking samurai such as himself. 

As such, he represents almost everything that’s wrong with the feudal order while Mizuno represents the rest. It’s Mizuno that secretly plots against the plotters, manipulating them into giving up their assassination mission by claiming to have switched sides only to backtrack and reveal he’s actually still working for Nariatsu fearing a reputational loss for the Tokugawa. Chief revenger Hayato (Isao Natsuyagi) is also banking on this fear of reputational damage, certain that the Shogunate won’t be able to bear the humiliation of Nariastsu being killed by a ronin so will instead claim that he died from an illness. Vowing to avenge the clan, Hayato righteously gives up his position to become one so that the Abes won’t be linked to the crime and is joined by 10 more similarly annoyed samurai. Six of them are already “dead” having been asked to commit seppuku for recklessly attacking Nariatsu on their own and blowing the whole operation. 

Hayato at least believes this to be a suicide mission. He leaves his loving wife and home and allows people to think he’s run off with Nui (Eiko Okawa), the younger sister of one of their number who died before he could join them. They do this because they think it must be done, and also because if no one stands up to samurai oppression it will never end. Wandering peasant Daijuro (Ko Nishimura) agrees with them. He wants revenge on the samurai for raping his sister after which his father and brother took their own lives. Nariatsu is as good as anyone else and he does very much need to die. 

But despite Daijuro’s homemade cannons, nothing quite goes to plan. Kudo sets his final battle in an atmospheric, misty valley that is an obvious stand in for the underworld. Hayato may succeed in killing Nariatsu but it’s a pyrrhic victory. Though he vowed “to put an end to this ridiculous world,” a samurai cannot really win this battle. It’s Daijuro who eventually walks off with Nariatsu’s head, symbolically decapitating the shogunate which the closing titles confirm was mortally wounded by this incident. With his striking black and white cinematography, Kudo does indeed paint this samurai world as a hellish place ruled over by an infinitely corrupt and self-interested authority. The nihilistic futility of it all is emphasised by the figure of a grown man sitting like a small child and splashing his sword in a puddle while surrounded by dead bodies. There might be a way out of this, but not for the samurai, only for those who will come after and perhaps finally be free of this world’s absurdity.

Blue Ribbon Awards Announces Winners for 67th Edition

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The Blue Ribbon Awards, presented by film critics and writers in Tokyo, has announced the winners for the 67th edition which honours films released in 2024. Unexpected indie hit A Samurai in Time picked up both Best Film and Best Actor while Yu Irie’s A Girl Named Ann took Director and Actress.

Best Film 

Best Director

Best Actor

  • Tsuyoshi Kusanagi (Bushido)
  • Taiga Nakano (11 Rebels)
  • Makiya Yamaguchi (A Samurai in Time)
  • Kento Yamazaki (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General, Golden Kamuy, The Yin Yang Master Zero)
  • Ryusei Yokohama (Faceless, MIRRORLIAR FILMS Season5)

Best Actress

  • Satomi Ishihara (Missing)
  • Yuumi Kawai (A Girl Named Ann, Desert of Namibia)
  • Hana Sugisaki (52-Hertz Whales, Sakura)
  • Masami Nagasawa (All About Suomi)
  • Hikari Mitsushima (Last Mile)

Best Supporting Actor

  • Sosuke Ikematsu (My Sunshine, Baby Assassins: Nice Days)
  • Takao Osawa (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Eiji Okuda (Stay Mum)
  • Jiro Sato (A Girl Named Ann, Arata Natsume’s Marriage, Saint☆Oniisan THE MOVIE ~Holy Men VS Akuma Gundan)
  • Ken Yasuda (Sakura, The War of Announcers)

Best Supporting Actress

  • Akiko Oshidari (Living in Two Worlds)
  • Maki Carrousel (Voice)
  • Kyoko Koizumi (Silence of the Sea, Bushido, i ai, Belonging, Muroi Shinji: Ikitsuzukeru Mono)
  • Yuri Nakamura (Amalock, Samurai Detective Onihei: Blood For Blood)
  • Ayaka Miyoshi (Sensei’s Pious Lie, The Real You)
  • Anna Yamada (Golden Kamuy, Faceless)
  • Riho Yoshioka (Faceless, Maru, At the Bench)

Best Newcomer

  • Keitatsu Koshiyama (My Sunshine, Arata Natsume’s Marriage)
  • Jun Saito (Let’s Go Karaoke!, Confetti, Teasing Master Takagi-san Movie, Muroi Shinji: Yaburezaru Mono, Muroi Shinji: Ikitsuzukeru Mono)
  • Akira Nakanishi (My Sunshine)
  • Jinsei Hamura (Golden Boy)
  • Ikoi Hayase (Worlds Apart, Sana: Let Me Hear)

Best Foreign Film

  • Poor Things
  • Inside Out 2
  • Oppenheimer
  • The Colour Purple
  • The Zone of Interest
  • Civil War
  • Dune: Part Two
  • Beau Is Afraid
  • YOLO
  • Mufasa: The Lion King
  • Anatomy of a Fall

Source: Sponichi

Japan Academy Film Prize Announces Nominees for 48th Edition

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The Japan Academy Film Prize, Japan’s equivalent of the Oscars awarded by the Nippon Academy-Sho Association of industry professionals, has announced the candidate list for its 48th edition which honours films released Jan. 1 – Dec. 31, 2024 that played in a Tokyo cinema at least three times a day for more than two weeks. This year’s frontrunner is Michihito’s Fujii’s Netflix movie Faceless which is nominated for 13 awards in 12 categories while the fourth instalment in the Kingdom franchise and Ayuko Tsukahara’s Last Mile follow closely behind with nominations in 10 categories. The awards ceremony will take place at Grand Prince Hotel Shin Takanawa on 14th March.

Picture of the Year

Animation of the Year

Director of the Year

Screenplay of the Year

  • Yu Irie (A Girl Named Ann)
  • Satomi Oshima (90 Years Old – So What?)
  • Kazuhisa Kodera & Michihito Fujii (Faceless)
  • Akiko Nogi (Let’s Go Karaoke!)
  • Akiko Nogi (Last Mile)
  • Junichi Yasuda (A Samurai in Time)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

  • Satomi Ishihara (Missing)
  • Mone Kamishiraishi (All the Long Nights)
  • Yuumi Kawai (A Girl Named Ann)
  • Mitsuko Kusabue (90 Years Old – So What?)
  • Hikari Mitsushima (Last Mile)

Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

  • Seiyo Uchino (Hakkenden)
  • Takao Osawa (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Masaki Okada (Last Mile)
  • Jiro Sato (A Girl Named Ann)
  • Takayuki Yamada (Faceless)

Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

  • Mana Ashida (Cells at Work!)
  • Kaya Kiyohara (Bushido)
  • Tao Tsuchiya (Hakkenden)
  • Anna Yamada (Faceless)
  • Riho Yoshioka (Faceless)

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography

  • Tomoyuki Kawakami (Faceless)
  • Akira Sako (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Takeshi Seki (Last Mile)
  • Daisuke Soma (Golden Kamuy)
  • Junichi Yasuda (A Samurai in Time)

Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Direction

  • Koshiro Ueno (Faceless)
  • Hiroyuki Kase (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Kazuyuki Kawasato (Last Mile)
  • Kota Sato (Golden Kamuy)
  • Kinya Doi, Hiroshi Hano, Junichi Yasuda (A Samurai in Time)

Outstanding Achievement in Music

  • Takashi Ohmama (Faceless)
  • Hiroko Sebu (Let’s Go Karaoke!)
  • Masahiro Tokuda (Last Mile)
  • Yutaka Yamada (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Face 2 fAKE (Cells at Work!)

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

  • Toshihiro Isomi & Emiko Tsuyuki (Golden Kamuy)
  • Masazumi Okihara (11 Rebels)
  • Hidetaka Ozawa (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Shintaro Matsumoto (Faceless)
  • Masumi Miura (Cells at Work!)

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Recording

  • Tomohara Urata (11 Rebels)
  • Takashi Kanasugi (Cells at Work)
  • Hiroyuki Saijo (Last Mile)
  • Kazushiko Yokono (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Toru Yonezawa (recording) / Yosuke Hamada (post-production) (Faceless)

Outstanding Achievement in Film Editing

  • Hiroaki Itabe (Last Mile)
  • Tsuyoshi Imai (Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General)
  • Tatsuma Furukawa (Faceless)
  • Hiroshi Matsuo (Cells at Work)
  • Junichi Yasuda (A Samurai in Time)

Outstanding Foreign Language Film

  • Poor Things
  • Oppenheimer
  • The Zone of Interest
  • Civil War
  • Laapataa Ladies

Newcomer of the Year 

  • Asuka Saito (Oshi No Ko – The Final Act)
  • Nagisa Shibuya (Sana: Let Me Hear)
  • Anna Yamada (Golden Kamuy, Faceless)
  • Eiji Akaso (6 Lying University Students, What If Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa Was to Become the Prime Minister)
  • Rihito Itagaki (Hakkenden, Cells at Work!, The Ying Yang Master 0)
  • Keitatsu Koshiyama (My Sunshine)
  • Jun Saito (Let’s Go Karaoke!)
  • Shintaro Morimoto (Faceless)

Special Award from the Association

  • Hiroshi Ichimaru (set decoration & props)
  • Tsutomu Kawahigashi (Dolby Sound consultant)
  • Tatsuo Momose (painting & ageing)
  • Kensei Mori (line producer)

Award for Distinguished Service from the Chairman

  • So Kuramoto (screenwriter)
  • Daisaku Kimura (director & cinematographer)
  • Kotaro Satomi (actor)
  • Misako Watanabe (actress)

Special Award from the Chairman

  • Noriko Ohara (voice actress)
  • Nobuyo Oyama (voice actress)

Special Award of Honour from the Association

  • Toshiyuki Nishida

Sources: Japan Academy Film Prize official website, Eiga Natalie

Alone No More (得寵先生, Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai, 2024)

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A little dog literally and more figuratively saves the life of a grumpy old man in Daniel Ho & Thomas Lee Chi-wai’s warmhearted drama Alone No More (得寵先生). Touching on themes of old age loneliness, familial estrangement, animal cruelty, and life’s stray dogs, the film makes the case that all lives are important, both human and canine, and that we should try to forgive each other in the same way that dogs seem to continually forgive us.

In any case, it’s difficult to see why stray dog Roast Piggy chooses the grumpy Kai (Lawrence Cheng Tan-shui) to be her owner despite his animosity towards her. Kai is hostile to pretty much everyone and appears to have a strained relationship with his remaining family members from the resentful brother who became his boss at work to the daughter Zoie (Fish Liew) who rarely returns his calls. Having recently retired, it seems that Kai has not much else left to live for which might be why he makes the decision to end his life and leave his retirement fund for Zoie and her daughter. Luckily, Roast Piggy arrives just in time to save Kai and alert Una (Amy Lo) who runs a dog sanctuary and had been trying to catch her.

Though Kai tries to chase Roast Piggy away, she always comes back to him and he eventually comes to accept her but only after getting a lesson in what the consequences of calling animal control can actually be. The film doesn’t go into why Hong Kong seems to have such a large problem with stray dogs but the man at the pound says they euthanise thousands a year many of which are microchipped but have owners who either can’t be contacted or simply refuse to take the dog back. It turns out the Roast Piggy was abandoned by her former owner because a fortune teller told him she was bad luck and it does seem like other of the dogs were similarly released into the wild either because their owners no longer wanted them or because they could not afford to pay for their medical treatment. Una had wanted to adopt Roast Piggy herself if Kai wouldn’t take her, but is cautioned by her boyfriend Chan (Jay Fung Wan-him) that it could get expensive if the problem turns out to be that Roast Piggy had heart worms. Though Roast Piggy seems friendly and used to people, it is clear some of the other stray dogs have unfortunately been mistreated and require further rehabilitation before they can be put up for adoption with a regular family. 

The same might be said of Kai who does begin to mellow after taking in Roast Piggy and getting a new lease of life helping out at the dog sanctuary. Nevertheless, his relationship with his daughter who is married to a Canadian man having moved there with her mother as a child is a little harder to repair. Though Una encourages him to make amends, she also has a strained relationship with her mother she is otherwise unwilling to work on though there is no real reason why she should. This sense of disconnection feeds back into her relationship with boyfriend Chan who, conversely, is under his father’s thumb and as always does exactly as he’s told. It’s Chan’s money that’s bankrolled the sanctuary which adds an additional layer of complication, though he is perhaps being slightly unreasonable when he’s hurt that Una doesn’t agree to suddenly drop everything and move to Edinburgh with him because she wants to stay in Hong Kong to save stray dogs. 

In a way, Kai and Una are the ones left behind, he by his age and loneliness and she by her regret and isolation. It’s clear that Una has replaced relationships with people with those with dogs whom she finds it easier to talk to. A subplot about a horrible person who’s been putting down poisoned meat because they don’t like the dogs being around hints at the callousness and cruelty that led to them becoming strays in the first place but also to the prejudices that see those like Kai and Una excluded from mainstream society even if Kai was indeed a very difficult person to be around before meeting Roast Piggy. Nevertheless they too find sanctuary at the Warm Heart dogs home along with purpose and compassion in caring for these kindhearted animals who have so much love and forgiveness even towards those that tried to cast them out.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Shunya Ito, 1988)

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“Poor things, born in the wrong time,” a woman laments of two girls perhaps not that much younger than herself yet as trapped by the age of militarism as anyone else. Adapted from a short story by Edogawa Rampo, Shunya Ito’s gothic mystery Labyrinth Romanesque (花園の迷宮, Hanazono no Meikyu) effectively skewers militarism’s hypocrisies and lays bare the dehumanising effects its nihilistic philosophy has wrought on the nation as a whole. When killing is almost an imperative, life has little value and brutality seemingly the only acceptable response to mass violence.

Ito conjures a sense of haunting by adding a modern day framing sequence in which the abandoned hotel is an eerie space of cobweb-ridden collapse. A wrecking ball arcs back and fore, threatening to unearth a truth long buried and this is after all a mystery, at least in part. With extraordinary finesse, the camera travels from the ruins into the hotel of old as a woman enters the frame. We are now in 1942. This is Yokohama, a harbour town, and so the “hotel” is filled with military personnel though transgressively it also seems trapped in a kind of before time. The sailors dance to American standards such as Georgia on my Mind and Goodnight Sweetheart though otherwise at war with America. All eyes are on sex worker Yuri (Hitomi Kuroki) and her dashing Zero Fighter pilot boyfriend, Takemiya (Tatsuo Nadaka).

But later we learn that Takemiya hated planes and was scared of heights to the point that it kept him up at night. Apparently from a military family, he felt unable to avoid going on with this militaristic charade and saw no future for himself other than glorious death. Everyone at the Fukuju Hotel is in their way already dead and chief among them the madam, Tae (Yoko Shimada), who becomes the prime suspect when her unpleasant husband Ichitaro (Akira Nakao) is murdered during the night. Her nemesis is however. Ichitaro’s sister, Kiku (Kyoko Enami), who has just been deported from the US where she had been living after selling herself into sexual slavery in order to financially support Ichitaro after their parents died. 

Kiku had been Tae’s madam, bringing her over from Japan at 17 and as she will do again, actively sitting on her face when she screamed and fought after being assigned her first customer. This brutalisation seems have driven Tae towards a desire for escape, but that was only available to her by marrying Ichiro who then betrayed his own sister to open another brothel that he ran with Tae before leaving the US and setting up in Yokohama in light of the declining relationship between America and Japan. Though she herself was brutalised, Tae can only earn her freedom by exploiting other women. At the beginning of the film two young girls, Mitsu (Mami Nomura), 18, and Fumi (Yuki Kudo), 17, arrive from the country excited for their new lives but without fully understanding what they’ve signed up to. Like Tae, Omitsu fights back when chosen by a sleazy, nouveau riche factory owner who made his money making planes for the navy, and while Tae tries to talk her down Kiku simply sits on her face and tells the man to do his business. Afterwards, Mitsu tries to kill herself and her friendship with Fumi is strained by her internalised sense of shame. Determined to save enough money to redeem Fumi’s contract before the same thing happens to her, she throws herself into sex work and begins to lose Fumi’s respect. 

It’s the two girls who see this place as haunted most clearly, firstly in catching sight of Tae wandering the corridors in her nighty on the night of her husband’s murder, and then by Fumi’s belief she has seen the pale ghost of a geisha only to realise it was just a wig on a shelf. Mitsu says it belonged to a woman who contracted syphilis, went mad, and then died, a fate she now fears may also befall her. Like many of the other women, the girls have been sold into sexual slavery by their parents most likely because their families are poor and they can’t feed their other children. This kind of rural poverty is of course exacerbated by the financial demands of imperial expansion while the dehumanising elements of militarism, the belief that everything must be devoted to the war effort, allow this heinous relic of the feudal past to continue. Sons after all belong to the emperor and will become brave soldiers fighting for their nation, while daughters have no intrinsic value other than as wives or sex workers to be advantageously traded or sold on.

It’s this that Fumi comes to realise and resent. She insists that she will never return to her home or parents because at the end of the day, they sold her. Yet she feels little sympathy on learning that one of the other women is a notorious criminal who murdered her foster parents because they too took girls in to sell them on. The hotel somehow becomes the nexus of all this pain and violence, a place the women can never escape. Ito does his best to make clear that this is hell by travelling through the air ducts, on towards the eerie glow of the furnace and the dank passages running under the hotel and out into the sea. The boiler room connects all other areas of the hotel and exposes all their secrets in the sound that travels through the ducts. But some secrets are designed to remain forever hidden until the wrecking balls of the contemporary era force them into the light and confront us with this buried history. Until then, the hotel exists in a ghostly state, Ito flooding it with hazy images and visitations that read as eternal apparitions of this place’s inescapable despair trapping all within its labyrinth of unresolved longing.

Trailer (no subtitles)