Although Masahiro Shinoda has long been admitted into the pantheon of Japanese New Wave masters, he is mostly remembered only for his 1969 adaptation of a Chikamatsu play, Double Suicide. Less overtly political than many of his contemporaries during the heady years of protest and rebellion, Shinoda was a consummate stylist whose films aimed to dazzle with visual flair or often to deliberately disorientate with their worlds of constant uncertainty. Like so many of the directors who would go on to form what would retrospectively become known as the Japanese New Wave, Shinoda also started out as a junior AD, in this case at Shochiku where he felt himself stifled by the studio’s famously safe, inoffensive approach to filmmaking.
By the late ‘60s that approach was itself failing and so the studio began to take a few chances on new young directors including Shinoda who was afforded the opportunity to script and direct his first feature – One-way Ticket to Love (恋の片道切符, Koi no katamichi kippu). Studio mandated programme picture as it was, Shinoda still had to play by some of the rules – notably that the title song which is a Japanese cover of the 1959 Neil Sedaka hit needed to feature prominently. Shinoda does indeed showcase the song throughout the film though he also paints a dark and unforgiving picture of the burgeoning talent management industry whilst sympathising with those trapped in the underworld to which the effects of growing economic prosperity have yet to trickle down.
Down on his luck 20 year old alto-sax player Kenji Shirai (Kazuya Kosaka) has resorted to hanging around stations in Tokyo alongside a host of other unemployed artists trying to get picked up for a job and having little success. His luck changes when a young female talent fixer, Miss Yoshinaga (Yachiyo Otori), finds herself in need of an alto sax player with immediate effect. Kenji is elated to find work but somewhat troubled when the club is abruptly raided, giving him a taste of the precariousness of the underground club scene. Nevertheless, Yoshinaga hands him a card and tells him to come to her office tomorrow in case she has any more work for him.
On his way home, Kenji comes across a distressed woman crying her heart out dangerously near a high bridge. Fearing she is about to commit suicide, Kenji comforts her and then takes her home for the night before introducing her to Yoshinaga the next day in the hope that she may also have work for a young woman – she does, but as a nudie dancer. Mitsuko (Noriko Maki) reluctantly takes the job leaving Kenji conflicted but there’s more drama in both of their lives to come in the form of “The Japanese Elvis” Ueno (Masaaki Hirao), Mitsuko’s married ex-boyfriend Tajima, and an errant pistol belonging to Kenji’s petty yakuza roommate.
Although Shinoda was less noticeably political than many of the other directors of the time, his sympathy remains with those who feels themselves to be oppressed or have in someway been cast aside by an unforgiving world. Kenji in particular feels himself to be just such a person, remarking that the world is a cruel place in which people look after their own interests and are prepared to use and discard those less fortunate in order to get what they want. Describing himself and Mitsuko as nothing more than offerings fit for burning on the altar that is the post-war economy, Kenji’s sense of hopelessness is palpable. Despite having acted to rescue Mitsuko from her suicidal contemplation, he feels powerless to help her in any other way and honestly tells her so each time she comes to him for comfort or assistance. Though his earnestness has an honest quality in its determination not to deceive, it also has an air of cowardice as he refuses to even discourage the woman he loves from doing something he knows she will regret because he has already decided that resistance is futile.
Mitsuko, by contrast, finds herself entirely without agency. Betrayed by the man she loved on discovering that he was already married and had been stringing her along, she finds it difficult to adjust to living life alone. Consequently she finds herself wooed by the big idol star of the day, Ueno, and then swept into a studio scam in which the pair are tricked into a sexual relationship with dire consequences for both. Ueno, who sings the all important title song at several points throughout the film, might be in a more comfortable position than Kenji but he is no more free. The studio’s prime cash cow, Ueno is pimped out to his hoards of screaming teenage girls and denied anything like a private life outside of studio control. As the latest dancer at the club, Mitsuko is assured that she’s going out there a rookie and coming back a star but her fate, along with Ueno’s, is entirely in the hands of the managers who can make or break a career at will.
If the interpersonal drama fails to convince, Shinoda makes up for it with unusually dynamic and interesting cinematography much more like the youth movies Nikkatsu were making at the time than the usual Shochiku stateliness. Looking much more like the European New Wave, Shinoda makes fantastic use of tracking shots and unusual framing to draw attention to the isolation of his protagonists. The club set finale featuring the title song is a masterclass in tension as Kenji roams around the audience, caught among the crowd of screaming girls before pausing for an up close contemplation of Ueno which leads him to his final decision. A programme picture, but one in which Shinoda declared his stylistic intentions if not his scripting prowess. One-way Ticket to Love dazzles with visual flair but never captivates on anything other than a superficial level as its story of love frustrated by social inequality and controlling authority fails to deliver on the melancholy promise of the title.
Final sequence featuring the title song by Masaaki Hirao (English subtitles)
The premier European showcase for East Asian cinema, 
The festival will open with the latest film from Shinobu Yaguchi (
Take a look at Andy in action in the official trailer (English subtitles)
Starring Fang Bingbing, this story of a small town woman taking on the Chinese legal system after her husband falsely accuses her of having an affair has been picking up awards all along the international festival trail.
A heartwarming tale of a little girl who takes refuge at the home of her uncle and his transgender girlfriend, Close-Knit marks a welcome return to the warm and quirky Ogigami world.
My Uncle (ぼくのおじさん, Boku no Ojisan) stars Ryuhei Matsuda as an eccentric philosophy lecturer who leeches off his nephew’s family until he unexpectedly meets a woman, falls in love, and follows her to Hawaii!
Among Yamashita’s more serious films, Over the Fence stars Joe Odagiri as a broken hearted young man who returns to his hometown after his wife leaves him.
Loosely based on a 1985 film by Masato Harada, Scoop! Stars Masaharu Fukuyama as an amoral paparazzo.
Ji Chang-wook plays a top gamer who suddenly finds himself trapped in a real world conspiracy when he is framed for a shocking crime.
This mystery/thriller stars Kim Yunjin as a former housewife released from prison 25 years after her husband and son disappeared leaving her accused of a crime.
There will also be a small strand of recent Chinese indie including Knife in the Clear Water (清水里的刀子) which we 
Festival season is well and truly underway and in the first of two big announcements of today Cannes has confirmed its full lineup. China, HK, and Taiwan are notably absent this year but it’s otherwise a good one for Asian film with five features from Korea (inlcuding two from prolific director Hong Sang-soo) and three from Japan. Scroll down for a checklist by country:
In the Competition section, Cannes favourite Naomi Kawase returns with her latest movie – Radiance (光, Hikari) which stars An’s Masatoshi Nagase as a photographer slowly losing his eyesight.
The story of a young girl’s struggle to save her mysterious animal friend from a giant multi-national company, Okja will be streamed worldwide on Netflix from June 28.
Japan’s kaiju movies have an interesting relationship with their monstrous protagonists. Godzilla, while causing mass devastation and terror, can hardly be blamed for its actions. Humans polluted its world with all powerful nuclear weapons, woke it up, and then responded harshly to its attempts to complain. Godzilla is only ever Godzilla, acting naturally without malevolence, merely trying to live alongside destructive forces. No creature in the Toho canon embodies this theme better than Godzilla’s sometime foe, Mothra. Released in 1961, Mothra does not abandon the genre’s anti-nuclear stance, but steps away from it slightly to examine another great 20th century taboo – colonialism and the exploitation both of nature and of native peoples. Weighty themes aside, Mothra is also among the most family friendly of the Toho tokusatsu movies in its broadly comic approach starring well known comedian Frankie Sakai.
Ishiro Honda returns to outer space after The Mysterians with another dose of alien paranoia in the SFX heavy Battle in Outer Space (宇宙大戦争, Uchu Daisenso). Where many other films of the period had a much more ambivalent attitude to scientific endeavour, Battle in Outer Space paints the science guys as the thin white line that stands between us and annihilation by invading forces wielding superior technology. Far from the force which destroys us, science is our salvation and the skill we must improve in order to defend ourselves from hitherto unknown threats.
The Korea of the mid-1980s was a society in flux though you might not know it looking at the sleepy small town about to be rocked by the country’s very first publicised spate of serial killings. Between 1986 and 1991, at least ten women ranging in age from schoolgirls to grandmothers were murdered while the killer seemingly got away with his crimes, either dying, fleeing or perhaps getting arrested on other charges explaining the abrupt end to his crime spree. Bong Joon-ho’s fictionalised take on the case, Memories of Murder (살인의 추억, Salinui Chueok), is not so much interested in the killer’s identity, but wants to ask a few hard questions about why the crimes took place and why they were never solved.
