Hostel first published (in a slightly different version) by EyeforFilm, 22 March, 20006 One has to feel a little bit sorry for Eli Roth. After his breakthrough debut with Cabin Fever (2002), a hilariously icky pastiche of seventies and eighties horror motifs, this young, articulate filmmaker, with his flair for self-promotion and his list of personal friends…
Graveyard(s) of Honor (1975/2002) first published by Little White Lies, as part 111 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Rikio Ishikawa, the hero of this film, was born in Aug 6, 1924.” So reads the text that opens Kinji Fukasaku’s Graveyard of Honor (Jingi no Hakaba, 1975), as we see black-and-white photographs from the very real…
First Love (Hatsukoi) first published by Little White Lies “Things are getting complicated,” young low-ranking yakuza Kase (Shōta Sometano) tells corruptible police detective Otomo (Nao Ômori, Ichi from Takashi Miike‘s 2003 Ichi the Killer) near the beginning of Miike’s latest, First Love (Hatsukoi). As Gondo (Seiyô Uchino), the boss of Kase’s syndicate, returns from a…
“I’ve always been an outsider”: Takashi Miike on making films at the margins. First published by SciFiNow. Prolific barely begins to describe Takashi Miike, the bad boy of Japanese indie cinema. Few directors manage to amass over 100 films to their name, even fewer do so in just over a quarter of a century, and fewer…
Outside(r) favourites: twenty great films by Takashi Miike first published, in a shorter film (15 films, I think), by Little White Lies upon the release of the director’s 100th feature, Blade of the Immortal (2017), at the London Film Festival ( and subsequently in UK cinemas in December 2017) Outsider. Maverick. Outlaw. Punk. These terms are regularly applied…
Review first published (in a different form) by Sight and Sound “Sometimes I wish that the play was my real life,” says husband and father Jun (Ito Hideaki). “I don’t,” replies Miyuki (Shibasaki Ko), who is playing the wronged wife Iwa in a production of Yotsuya Kaidan, even as she suspects that her lover (and…
Longer version of piece published by Sight & Sound as part of coverage of the Cult programme at the London Film Festival 2015 Across an impossibly prolific and varied filmography, Takashi Miike has made the yakuza perhaps his most visited subject, although not always in a realist milieu. In his Dead or Alive (1999), he pitted…
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai first published by EyeforFilm “Another one?” This is the grimly resigned response of Kageyu (Koji Yakusho), Chief Official of the noble Ii clan, when he is informed that there is at the gate a shabbily dressed ronin, or masterless samurai, seeking permission to commit formal seppuku (also known as harakiri, or…
Synopsis: In Takashi Miike’s post-modern foray into the western genre, a gun-toting stranger inserts himself into age-old hostilities in a dust-blown town. Review: Like the ‘half-breed’ boy Heihachi (Ruka Uchida) at its core, Sukiyaki Western Django is a film of confounded and contested pedigrees, occupying the shifting generic borderlands where samurai flick meets oater and East meets West,…
Visitor Q first published by Movie Gazette In 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini made Teorema (or Theorem), in which, by depicting a middle-class family torn apart by the arrival of a mysterious stranger who seduces each of its members, the Marxist director launched an effectively shocking onslaught on the traditional values of the bourgeoisie. Teorema was…
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…