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Miho Nakayama, a respected Japanese music and film personality, died at 54. Her agency, Big Apple, confirmed her death on Friday. Nakayama was discovered deceased at her Tokyo residence, leaving a considerable legacy in the entertainment world.

Her abrupt passing has shocked fans and colleagues. The cause of her death has not yet been determined as investigations continue. Her website had earlier that day postponed a Christmas show in Osaka owing to her health struggles.

Nakayama was born in Tokyo on March 1, 1970, and her career began in 1985. That year, she made her television debut on TBS, released her first single, “C,” and appeared in a film adaptation of the manga “Be-Bop High School.”

In the late 1980s, Nakayama became famous in the city pop genre. She is famous for successful singles like “Waku Waku Sasete” and albums like “After School,” “Catch the Nite,” and “Mind Game.” Despite releasing fewer music albums in the early 2000s,...

If the last letter you received from your lover was as banal as Augustine Frizzell’s new feature, you’d dump them like a shot. But mercifully for box office figures, we have all missed going to the movies so are inclined to be more open-minded towards snarky men spouting cliches and the women who love them. As long as their dramas play out on the big screen.

At first glance, The Last Letter from Your Lover is the bland, romance by numbers you find in large print novels on local library shelves or mildewing and neglected on a three for a fiver carousel in a caravan park shop. Safe and predictable with tick boxes for a neglectful hubby, Chanel suits, a caddish chap and foreign holibobs. However, this love story has been pepped up by the Soda Stream fizz of a parallel storyline to tickle your fancy when you...

The past isn’t just a different country, but a different movie entirely, in “The Last Letter From Your Lover,” a lushly mounted pair of love stories — one present, one past — that are faintly enmeshed but almost entirely disparate in tone, style and emotional impression. In the first, Shailene Woodley and Callum Turner fall hard for each other in an obstacle-strewn, 1960s-set romance of chance encounters, missed connections and moist-eyed rendezvous on railway platforms, channeling the vintage Hollywood melodrama of “An Affair to Remember.” In the second, Felicity Jones is a cut-glass hybrid of Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones, falling only incidentally for the awkward archivist who assists her in piecing together the former story, before the narratives merge in a more British, neatly calligraphed rewrite of “The Notebook.”

Having previously made her name with the spiky, Sundance-stamped girls-gone-wild comedy “Never Goin’ Back,” director Augustine Frizzell doesn’t seem an...

Shunji Iwai graduated from Yokohama National University in 1987. He wrote and directed numerous music videos, commercials and television dramas before he moved to cinema. His TV drama Fireworks, Should We See It From the Side or the Bottom? (1993) earned him the Director’s Guild of Japan New Directors Award. He made his feature film debut Love Letter in 1995. Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) was nominated for the Golden St. George at Moscow International Film Festival. Vampire (2011) marked Iwai’s English-language film debut and was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. For his 2016 film A Bride for Rip van Winkle, he was inspired by internet dating. The film was released in multiple versions, including a six-episode television series. In 2016, he also received a Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award at New York Asian Film Festival. Besides directing, he has written several essays, novels and screenplays, as well as composing the soundtrack for seven of his films.

February 12-18, 2021 – the USA only

(February 4, 2021) Chicago, Il – On the day of ‘little’ year that kicks off the official preparation of the new lunar year per Chinese customs, Asian Pop-Up Cinema announces a “Happy Lunar New Year-Watch 7 movies Free” program sponsored by the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Chicago, February 12-18, 2021. Seven movies are specifically handpicked for people to enjoy while celebrating the Year of the Ox.

Films chosen by the festival’s Founder and Executive Director, Sophia Wong Boccio include recent cinema sensations Ne Zha, China’s top-grossing 3D animated family film inspired by the Chinese legend and lore; award-winning documentary, Four Springs; martial art action The Unity of Heroes; romantic drama Last Letter; a fantasy/comedy, The Island; the box office smash hit, I Belonged to You; and a story of four generations spanning a hundred years of modern Chinese history, Forever Young.

Having a great cast in his hands, Shunji Iwai decided to take a trip down his own cinematic past this time, resulting in a rather nostalgic film that works on a number of levels, but also seems to fail to pack a punch. The script is based on his own novel, while in 2018 he directed a homonymous, Chinese film starring Zhou Xun.

Yuri is a middle-aged mother who has just returned to the area she grew up, along with her daughter, Fuka, to attend the funeral of her older sister, Misaki, who has just died, leaving her own daughter, Ayumi, with her grandmother, since her husband is out of the picture. When an invitation for a class reunion comes to the house, Yuri decides to attend, to inform her sister’s classmates of her death, but finds herself being confused with Misaki, to the point that an old boyfriend of hers,...