Tokyo Ghoul first published by Sight & Sound, March 2018 Review: Though hardly a household name in the West, the Tokyo Ghoul mythos is ‘big in Japan’: first a success as Sui Ishida’s serial manga (from 2011), next as Shuhei Morita’s animated television series, and then as prequels and sequels in both those media, as well…
Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky first published by Movie Gazette – here in a longer, expanded version There was a notorious scene in First Blood (1982) when Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo established his tough-guy credentials by stitching up his own arm wound. The hero of Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky, whose name is not so far from another…
First published by Little White Lies The exploitation cinema of the early 1970s was, in keeping with the times in which it was made, awash with a contradictory mix of the revolutionary and the reactionary – and there are few films that illustrate this dichotomy more clearly than the Hanzo the Razor trilogy, comprising Misumi Kenji’s Hanzo…
Ichi the Killer first published by Movie Gazette Based on a popular Japanese comicbook by Hideo Yamamoto, Takashi Miike’s controversial Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, or Killer 1) translates perfectly all the manga’s energy, anarchy and illogic into the kinetic language of film. When yakuza boss Anjo goes missing with 300 million yen, his loyal lieutenant Kakihara (Tadanobu…
Kamui: The Lone Ninja first published by EyeforFilm Sai Yoichi’s Kamui: The Lone Ninja resurrects a brand of hyper-stylised, ultra-bleak chanbara not seen since the Wakayama Tomisaburo-starring hexalogy of 1970s Baby Cart films, whose peripatetic heroes Lone Wolf and Son are perhaps best-known to English-speaking viewers through Robert Houston’s re-dubbed remix of the first two Baby instalments…