September 29, 2024

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CULTURE

Film

Entertainment news

Marina Tsukada got the idea for her anthology “Mitsuki, Sekai” from her acquaintance with the two young lead actors, whom she first met at a video workshop she conducted in Nagano Prefecture.

CULTURE / Film

Sep 20, 2024

Marina Tsukada lets local lives shape her work

By Mark Schilling

The director’s latest, “Mitsuki, Sekai,” is part of an ongoing project that traces the lives of Nagano Prefecture-based children for a decade until they reach adulthood.

Ryo Yoshizawa plays a young man with deaf parents in Mipo O’s decade-spanning drama, “Living in Two Worlds.”

CULTURE / Film

Sep 19, 2024

‘Living in Two Worlds’ raises the bar for depictions of deafness

By James Hadfield

Mipo O’s film about a child of deaf adults is best when it doesn’t try to educate viewers.

Marina Tsukada’s “Mitsuki, Sekai” features young nonprofessional actors in the director’s native Nagano Prefecture as their characters mature from childhood to adulthood.

CULTURE / Film

Sep 19, 2024

Intimate and revelatory, ‘Mitsuki, Sekai’ explores the quiet trials of girlhood

By Mark Schilling

Marina Tsukada’s anthology feature containing two unconnected short films lays bare the inner lives of young Japanese women in unexpected ways.

"Nightbitch," which premiered at the Toronto film festival on Sept. 7, stars Amy Adams (center) as Mother, an artist who becomes a harried stay-at-home mom caring for a boisterous toddler.

CULTURE / Film

Sep 14, 2024

Amy Adams gets real about motherhood in 'Nightbitch'

By Susan Stumme

The film explores various facets of motherhood — the wonder and joy, but also the darkness and exhaustion — using equal doses of comedy, drama and magical realism.

Masami Nagasawa looks fabulous in a range of outfits as the eponymous protagonist of “All About Suomi.”

CULTURE / Film

Sep 12, 2024

‘All About Suomi’: The leading lady shines, but the film lacks sparkle

By James Hadfield

Masami Nagasawa’s performance as a woman whose true self is hard to pin down elevates an otherwise middling Koki Mitani comedy.

A young boy (Keitatsu Koshiyama, center) and his skating partner (Kiara Nakanishi, left) blossom under the dedicated guidance of their coach (Sosuke Ikematsu) in “My Sunshine.”

CULTURE / Film

Sep 12, 2024

‘My Sunshine’ brings together realism and lyricism to a rare degree

By Mark Schilling

Hiroshi Okuyama’s feature about teen skaters is a gentle masterwork that illustrates Japanese society’s deep conservatism with poignance and bite.

James Earl Jones in the Broadway revival of "Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in New York in March 2012. Jones, once a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, New York. He was 93.

CULTURE / Film

Sep 10, 2024

James Earl Jones, actor whose voice could menace or melt, dies at 93

By Robert D. McFadden

He gave life to characters like Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and Mufasa in “The Lion King,” and went on to collect Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys and an honorary Oscar.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

A woman passes an "akichi" (vacant lot) in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo. The capital is littered with such small lots in part because of Japan's aging and shrinking population.

Dealing with rising land vacancies as Japan shrinks

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

The celebrated artist ‘updating’ the kimono

The celebrated artist ‘updating’ the kimono

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