Blake Simons

6 days ago | easternkicks.com | Blake Simons

The world’s largest Japanese film festival reveals its first 2025 offerings…Nippon Connection — Frankfurt’s festival for Japanese cinema and the largest dedicated to Japanese cinema in the world — celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, playing host to around 100 feature and short films and 70 cultural events from 27th May to 1st June. The full programme is still to come, but the festival have revealed the first highlights from this year’s thematic strands to whet our appetites.

6 days ago | easternkicks.com | Blake Simons

The Korean actress talks a career grounded in empathy…Truly international actress Doona Bae cares deeply about our differences. As we discuss her recent film Next Sohee and her career at large over Zoom, she repeatedly emphasises human rights and her firm belief in respecting each other. It’s a refreshingly transparent conversation with a performer who prefers to be straightforward and simple, and in doing so manages to embody the nuances and complexities of the human experience.

2 weeks ago | easternkicks.com | Blake Simons

The transnational co-directors of a daring new documentary examine Aum’s impact past and present…A police radio. Some kind of gas is filling a train compartment on the Tokyo underground, and it’s making people sick. Soundtracking this archive audio, a low rumble gives rise to a Godzilla-like foghorn, but this disaster movie is no fantastical metaphor. Sometimes the raw truth can be as compelling, frightening, and bizarre as fiction.

3 weeks ago | screenanarchy.com | Blake Simons

We built this algorithm block by block. The IP movie has been on the rise of late -- tent-poles such as Barbie and The Super Mario Bros Movie each raked in over a billion dollars -- and so it is that A Minecraft Movie has spawned into cinemas. The input lag has been severe.

3 weeks ago | easternkicks.com | Blake Simons

The visionary director discusses the spirituality at the core of his current cinema…Toshiaki Toyoda is one of the most idiosyncratic voices in Japanese filmmaking today — a propulsive firecracker of a filmmaker who has spanned multiple genres, modes, and durations since his debut in 1998 with kinetic urban drama Pornostar. Back in the DVD days, Toyoda was best-known in the West for Blue Spring, a character-driven delinquent drama adapted from Taiyō Matsumoto’s manga of the same name.