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James Balmont

Writer at Freelance

🎹🎸 Music x @Swim_Deep ✍🏼📚 bylines x @Guardian, @BBC_Culture, @BFI, @Dazed, @AnOtherMagazine *probs tweeting about ambient music and foreign films*

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Articles

  • A guide to Taiwan’s dreamy New Cinema movement

    2 weeks ago | dazeddigital.com | James Balmont

    Following a month-long retrospective in March of one of the movement’s most beloved filmmakers –Cannes 2000 Best Director winner Edward Yang (Yi Yi) – the BFI continues its deep dive into one of East Asian cinema’s most remarkable filmmaking movements this April with Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.

  • 55 Years Ago, A Forgotten Monster Movie Inspired a Legendary Crossover

    1 month ago | inverse.com | James Balmont

    In the rocky wastelands of fictional Wester Island, lightning strikes as a volcano erupts in the distance. Here, a gnarled beast armed with horns and tusks —clad with a tough red-brown hide and boasting a flamboyant frilled spine — awakens with an otherworldly roar. This is Jiger, a fearsome rhino-triceratops monster capable of both flight and telekinesis, who can reduce men to ash and bones through the virtue of her “Super Ultra Wave” ray.

  • The chilling relevance of Tokyo's Cult of Aum terror attacks today

    1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | James Balmont

    By the time Aum's membership peaked at an estimated 11,400 in Japan in 1995, and 40,000 in Russia following a successful expansion following the fall of the Soviet Union, the cult had secretly murdered the family of anti-Aum lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto.

  • 964 Pinocchio: The story behind the disturbing 1991 cyberpunk fairytale

    1 month ago | dazeddigital.com | James Balmont

    Director Shozin Fukui shares the secrets behind the no-budget dystopian classic, which takes the bones of the 1940 Disney story and vomits them onto the streets of a near-future Japan7 Images In a nightmarish institution in industrial neo-Tokyo, a cybernetic sex slave is subjected to a power-drill lobotomy after failing to satisfy two handlers during an orgy.

  • Bong on Bong: the Mickey 17 and Parasite director looks back on his career

    1 month ago | wallpaper.com | James Balmont

    It’s been five years since Bong Joon Ho made Oscars history in 2020 with Parasite – a contemporary classic of social satire, and only the second film in history to win both the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now, the wait for a follow-up is finally over as the long-delayed sci-fi romp Mickey 17 hits the big screen in the UK (7 March 2025).

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James Balmont
James Balmont @JamesBalmont
5 Apr 25

RT @JamesBalmont: Ahead of the launch of @BFI’s new season on New Taiwan Cinema, I caught up with programmer Hyun Jin Cho and directors Che…

James Balmont
James Balmont @JamesBalmont
5 Apr 25

Ahead of the launch of @BFI’s new season on New Taiwan Cinema, I caught up with programmer Hyun Jin Cho and directors Chen Kun-hou and Huang Yu-shan to unpack some of the sumptuous highlights for @Dazed https://t.co/OVOe08gy6G

James Balmont
James Balmont @JamesBalmont
23 Mar 25

I’ve nabbed the cover of the Sunday @Telegraph’s Arts & Books section today, with an article marking 30 years of the Tokyo sarin attack as a new, Sundance-approved documentary hits US theatres (and streaming platforms in a few weeks): https://t.co/VGprTjVea6