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Music Awards Japan 2025 , one of the largest international music awards in Japan, announced the best works and artists in all 62 categories at the Premiere Ceremony held on May 21 and the Grand Ceremony on May 22. The award was established this year by five major Japanese music industry organizations to promote Japanese and other Asian music to the world, to make Japanese music a culture to be proud of globally, and to encourage overseas artists to enter the Japanese market. The two-member unit Yoasobi 's third single song, "Idol," which was featured as the opening theme song for the Oshi no Ko TV anime, won the Best Anime Song award. The song also won the Top Global Hit from Japan award and the Best Music Video award. Additionally, the unit's composer Ayase received the Song of the Year for Creators powered by Jasrac award for creating "Idol." Yoasobi's official X (formerly Twitter) wrote,...

Romantic films from directors like Makoto Shinkai and Yoshimitsu Morita showcase the best of Japanese cinema. It's a part of Asian entertainment that has seen a recent rise in worldwide popularity along with K-dramas. Similar to romantic K-dramas, many Japanese romance films employ some of the most popular tropes in romance, such as love at first sight and love triangles. These tropes allow all audiences to connect with the foreign films' stories.

Despite being seen in numerous films before, the way these tropes are integrated into the plot also helps the films to feel entirely brand new. Sky of Love and Shall We Dance? are some of the more well-known examples of Japanese romance films, but there are a few other picks that are worth a watch for romance fans. From stunning animation to live-action dramas, there's a Japanese romance film for everyone.

Related Netflix’s 10 Best Live-Action Japanese Shows,...

Tyler, the Creator’s life is a movie. Or, at least, that’s the impression he’s given us over the course of nearly 15 years. His debut mixtape, 2009’s Bastard, introduced us to its cast of characters — from Tyler’s pitched-down voice, serving as his therapist, Dr. Tc, to Wolf Haley, or Ace. From the start, his origin story has followed the hallmarks of the so-called trauma plot, where a central emotional fissure is essential to our main character’s struggles. Bastard’s focus, Tyler’s turbulent home life (most...

What do we do when tragedy strikes? What if it happens to one of our own family members? Grief hits us in different ways. There's no black and white 'right or wrong' on the human response, it seems. This notion is explored with a heavy hand in Love Life, a new contemplative film out of Japan that will make you cry, hug your loved ones, and more.

Skilled writer-director Kōji Fukada employs some innovative storytelling and filmmaking techniques in this latest feature that will keep us thinking about the complex love story he weaves long after the credits roll.

It's safe to say Love Life can be added to the list of great Japanese movies as of late. Here's our take.

Families Can Be Messy

With a title like Love Life, our minds might go to that Max series of the same name that featured Anna Kendrick in its acclaimed first season.

Emerging as one of the most accomplished Japanese directors of the last decade, Harmonium and A Girl Missing director Kōji Fukada is back with his next feature. Love Life, which premiered at Venice Film Festival last fall, follows a couple living with their young son, when a tragic accident brings the boy’s long-lost father back into their life. Ahead of an August 11 release beginning at IFC Center, the first U.S. trailer has now arrived from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Rory O’Connor said in his Venice review, “Love Life is one of those films that really wears its screenplay. The plot follows a mother’s attempts to come to terms with the death of a child, but it’s more about unusual paths the journey takes for her to get there. The director is Kôji Fukada, a filmmaker who studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa and cites Rohmer as a key influence. The...

In two weeks, the best in new Japanese cinema will descend upon New York City with the 16th edition of Japan Cuts. Taking place from July 26 through August 6 at Japan Society, this year’s impressive lineup features nearly 30 films along with special tribute to the legendary, late Ryuichi Sakamoto. In anticipation of the festival’s launch, we’re delighted to present the exclusive trailer and poster debut.

“Japan Cuts is back in-person!” says Peter Tatara, Director of Film at Japan Society, who organized this year’s festival with Japan Society Film Programmer Alexander Fee. “Japan Cuts is one of Japan Society’s most popular events and beloved in New York’s cinema scene. After a pause during the pandemic, we couldn’t be more proud for Japan Cuts to return with two weeks of exciting, thought-provoking and tear-jerking films. We’re honored to share a captivating slice of Japan’s cinematic world with New York!

North America's largest Japanese film festival presents two weeks of contemporary movies from Japan, including opening film The First Slam Dunk directed by Takehiko Inoue, centerpiece film Under The Turquoise Sky directed by Kentaro, closing film The Three Sisters Of Tenmasou Inn directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

Japan Society announces the full lineup of the 16th annual Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film, the largest festival of its kind in North America, set for July 26–August 6. This year's edition will present 29 films and mark the first fully in-person Japan Cuts since 2019. This year's festival spans 12 days and features 24 feature-length films and five short films across Feature Slate, Next Generation, and Short Film Spotlight sections, as well as a special tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto. Among the festival's lineup are five International Premieres, 10 North American Premieres, seven U.S. Premieres, three East Coast Premieres and three New York Premieres. Additionally, Japan Cuts...

Exclusive: Blockbuster animated feature The First Slam Dunk will open Japan Cuts, a festival of Japanese cinema in New York, which will also feature a special tribute to late Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

The festival will also present the Cut Above award for Outstanding Achievement to actor Yuya Yagira for his role in Kentaro’s Under The Turquoise Sky, which will screen as the Centerpiece Film. Yagira was the youngest ever winner of Best Actor at the Cannes film festival for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows in 2004. Yagira and Kentaro will both attend the festival.

The First Slam Dunk, which will be making its East Coast premiere at Japan Cuts, is the highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office so far this year and was recently acquired by Gkids for North American distribution.

The Ryuichi Sakamoto tribute involves a screening of Elizabeth Lennard’s 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Award

Paramount+ and Tving‘s Korean series “Bargain” has won the critics’ choice award at the Seriencamp Festival in Cologne. In April, “Bargain” became the first-ever Korean series to win best screenplay at the Canneseries Festival in France.

The series stars actors Jun Jong-seo (“Money Heist: Korea”) and Jin Seon-kyu (“Extreme Job”) and is an adaptation of director Lee Chung-hyun’s 2015 short film of the same name. Director Jun Woo-sung, who was part of the production team of the short, picked up the story and developed it into a six-part series. “Bargain” revolves around a group of strangers who gather at a remote motel with ulterior motives – seeking to bargain. Unlike the original film, the series follows the characters after an unexpected earthquake traps them inside the building. With no one to trust, they must find a way to survive.

“Bargain” is developed by Paramount+ and Tving, out of Paramount...

The film played in Competition at Venice before heading to TIFF and Lff.

BFI Distribution has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to Koji Fukada’s Love Life.

The film premiered in Competition at Venice Film Festival in September 2022, going on to play festivals including Toronto and BFI London Film Festival.

BFI Distribution acquired the film from mk2 Films, and has set a release date of September 15, 2023. The film will play concurrently with the BFI’s Yasujiro Ozu season, from September 1 to October 3.

Inspired by a song of the same name by Japanese singer Akiko Yano, Love Life tells the story of...

Stan Refreshes Lionsgate Output Deal

Australian streamer Stan has refreshed its output deal with Lionsgate. The new agreement means Stan lands the local first-run of shows including the upcoming CIA thriller series Gray, starring Patricia Clarkson, Lydia West and Rupert Everett. Also on the menu are Son of a Critch, Welcome to Flatch and Steven K. Knight’s Spartacus sequel series. Theatrical features include White Bird, Alice and Darling. Stan will remain the Aussie home of the Power franchise, The Serpent Queen, Minx, Bmf, Gaslit and Hightown and also picks up Lionsgate catalog titles such as Mad Men, Weeds, The Spanish Princess, Black Sails, La La Land and Twilight.

Indigenous Canadian Stand-Up Show Readied

Exclusive: Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and the Canada Media Fund are among the backers of a comedy TV series billed as the first all-Canadian and Indigenous stand-up show. They have signed on to develop...

Ryuichi Sakamoto, a world-renowned Japanese musician and actor who composed for Hollywood hits such as “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant”, has died. He was 71.

Japan’s recording company Avex said in a statement Sunday that Sakamoto died on March 28 while undergoing treatment for cancer.

He was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014. In 2022, he revealed that he had terminal cancer, a year after he disclosed suffering from rectal cancer.

Sakamoto was a pioneer of the electronic music of the late 1970s and founded the Yellow Magic Orchestra, also known as Ymo, with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.

Takahashi died in January.

Despite his battle with cancer, Sakamoto released a full-length album 12 on his 71st birthday in January, stating that composing had a “small healing effect on my damaged body and soul,” according to the official statement released with the latest album.

He was a world-class musician, winning an Oscar...

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Oscar-winning composer, musician, actor, singer, producer, writer and activist from Japan, has died. He was 71.

Sakamoto died on March 28 of cancer, recording company Avex said in a statement posted to Twitter Sunday that thanks his medical teams in Japan and the U.S. and asks for fans to respect the privacy of his family at this time.

“While undergoing treatment for cancer discovered in June 2020, Sakamoto continued to create works in his home studio whenever his health would allow him to. He lived with music until the very end,” the statement says, noting a private funeral among close family has already taken place.

During a career that saw him scoring more than 40 films, including The Last Emperor (1987), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and The Revenant (2015), Sakamoto also received two Golden Globes, a Grammy Award and a BAFTA.

Born in Tokyo in 1952 to a clothes designer mother and literary editor father,...

Now in its 12th edition, the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival brings together a varied, eclectic lineup of cinema from all corners of the world––including a number of films still seeking distribution, making the series perhaps one of your only chances to see these works on the big screen. With the five-day festival kicking off Wednesday, March 15, we’re delighted to exclusively premiere the festival trailer and we’ve also gathered eight essential films to check out. Watch and read on below.

Fremont (Babak Jalali)

In Fremont, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is often alone. She lives in a small apartment in Fremont, California, commuting each day to her job in a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. She has a single friend that works there with her. Donya splits time between her apartment, the factory, and a therapist’s office, in hopes of receiving sleeping pills.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Oscilloscope releases the film in select theaters on Friday, August 11.

An enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper, Kōji Fukada’s “Love Life” represents a major breakthrough for a filmmaker who’s found the perfect story for his probing but distant style. In that light, it doesn’t seem incidental that “Love Life” is a story about distance — specifically the distance between people who reach for each other in the wake of a tragedy that strands them far away from themselves.

Inspired by the plaintive 1991 Akiko Yano song of the same name, “Love Life” introduces us to a domestic idyll that it disrupts with a deceptive casualness typical of Fukada’s work. The bloom comes off the rose slowly at first, and then all at once in a single moment of everyday awfulness.

Love Life is one of those films that really wears its screenplay. The plot follows a mother’s attempts to come to terms with the death of a child, but it’s more about unusual paths the journey takes for her to get there. The director is Kôji Fukada, a filmmaker who studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa and cites Rohmer as a key influence. The first of Fukada’s films to complete for one of the grand festival awards, it premiered this week in what has been if not the best, then at least the glitziest Venice lineup in recent memory. Amongst the stars, Love Life (named for an Akiko Yano song of the same name) is jarringly everyday in color palette and setting, but has just the right amount of scope, filmmaking nous, and unusual choices to hold its own and even stand out.

A neat film of knotty ideas,...

Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

That film was an exercise in disorienting tonal contrast and conflict, with a vein of blood-dark comedy running through severely tragic events. “Love Life,” on the other hand, is an earnest,...

Enormous personal events unfold throughout Kôji Fukada’s soulful Japanese drama “Love Life,” premiering at the Venice Film Festival: a marriage, a reunion, an affair and, most notably, a death. And yet the scale in which Fukada works — as both writer and director — is so deliberately intimate that immense experiences feel microcosmic, while tiny moments make a huge impact.

His heroine, Taeko (Fumino Kimura), is so self-effacing that it often feels as though she would erase herself if she could. Most of the time, she is able to look to others for meaning and definition; in her small, generic flat within a block of large, generic apartment buildings, she serves her in-laws, her husband, her son Keita (Tetta Shimada). At work, from a cubicle or a sidewalk, she serves as a social advocate, helping unhoused and otherwise disadvantaged strangers.

When she can’t find something to do, she lingers in near-immobility,...

Click here to read the full article.

The apartment at the center of Love Life, Koji Fukada’s mellow study of grief and dislocation, is, like the film, compact and practical. A long table, surrounded by a narrow bench and various chairs, occupies the center of the living room. The kitchen is tucked in a corner. Near the entrance: a bathroom with a short tub, a sink, a toilet. Toward the rear: sliding doors leading to a balcony overlooking a hideous concrete lot; a bedroom on the right. Evidence of family life is everywhere: height marks etched into a wall, trophies, diplomas, a child’s drawings, books, clothes on hooks, shoes in corner.

Taeko (Fumino Kimura), Jiro (Kento Nagayama) and their 6-year-old son, Keita (Tetta Shimada), live in this unfussy space, and how they interact with it is one of the most edifying aspects of Fukada’s latest feature. With Love Life,...

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Six years after his 2016 film Harmonium won Cannes’ jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section, Japanese director Koji Fukada is taking the big step up into Venice’s main competition with the emotionally intense family drama Love Life.

Fukada’s rise to the top tier of the international festival circuit has been telegraphed for some time. His breakthrough family comedy Hospitalité won best picture in the Japanese cinema category of the 2010 Tokyo International Film Festival, and in 2020 that same event featured him as its director in focus with a mini-retrospective. Effectively, the Tokyo festival’s organizers were arguing that Fukada was worthy of the type of top-level industry attention that Venice has now bestowed upon him.

Fukada’s ninth feature, Love Life tells a taut domestic drama about a newly married Japanese couple (Fumino Kimura and Kento Nagayama) enjoying a peaceful existence...

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For the 79th Venice Film Festival, artistic director Alberto Barbera has put together one of the most well-curated lineups of his career. Both studios and streamers are well represented.

Netflix scored an opening-night coup with Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, with buzz promising that it’ll wow the Lido, alongside Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde, with Ana de Armas; Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mexican epic Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; and Romain Gavras’ French action thriller Athena.

Studio fare is well represented by Warner Bros.’ Don’t Worry Darling from director Olivia Wilde; Focus has Todd Field’s Tár with Cate Blanchett and Mark Strong; MGM will debut Luca Guadagnino’s Timothée Chalamet-Taylor Russell starrer Bones and All; Searchlight presents The Banshees of Inisherin from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri director Martin McDonagh; and Sony Pictures Classics will be...

Love Life

Just a couple of weeks back we saw Japan’s Koji Fukada name attached to a market project going by the title of Love on Trial. Is this project and Love Life one of the same? After a 2020 that saw the helmer work in the short form with a three film output, production on Love Life (inspired by a song by Japanese artist Akiko Yano and the consequences of the pandemic) would have began in September of 2021 with some French production money. We know Fukada best from a string of popular film fest items in Sayonara (2015), Harmonium (2016), The Man from the Sea (2018), A Girl Missing (read the review) and finally The Real Thing (2020).…...

My Neighbours The Yamadas (Studio Ghibli)

Stars: Havato Isobata, Masako Araki, Naomi Uno, Touru Masuoka, Yukiji Asoka, James Belushi, Molly Shannon, Daryl Sabara, LIliana Mumy, Tress MacNeille | Written by Hisaichi Ishii | Directed by Isao Takahata

“The little victories of the quirky Takashi Yamada and his wacky wife Matsuko, are followed in this touching animation from Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies) and Studio Ghibli, the next film from the Studio’s classic catalogue to arrive on blu-ray. The Yamadas navigate their way through the ups and downs of work, marriage, and family life with a sharp-tongued grandmother who lives with them, a teenage son who wishes he had cooler parents, and a pesky daughter whose loud voice is unusual for someone so small. Even the family dog has issues!”

My Neighbours the Yamadas was the first anime film released by the famed Studio Ghibli that was completely coloured with computers.

    See the first poster from Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo" (a.k.a. "Gake no ue no Ponyo") helmed and written by Hayao Miyazaki.   The animated family adventure first came out in Japan last year and will see limited areas on the 14th of August on U.S. soil.   Japanese language cast includes Yuria Nara, Hiroki Doi, Jôji Tokoro, Tomoko Yamaguchi, Yuki Amami, Kazushige Nagashima, Akiko Yano and Shinichi Hatori. The English cast stars Cate Blanchett, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Madison Davenport, Cloris Leachman, Frankie Jonas, Lily Tomlin and Betty White.  ...

See the first poster from Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo" (a.k.a. "Gake no ue no Ponyo") helmed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. The animated family adventure first came out in Japan last year and will see limited areas on the 14th of August on U.S. soil. Japanese language cast includes Yuria Nara, Hiroki Doi, Jôji Tokoro, Tomoko Yamaguchi, Yuki Amami, Kazushige Nagashima, Akiko Yano and Shinichi Hatori. The English cast stars Cate Blanchett, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Madison Davenport, Cloris Leachman, Frankie Jonas, Lily Tomlin and Betty White.

See the first poster from Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo" (a.k.a. "Gake no ue no Ponyo") helmed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. The animated family adventure first came out in Japan last year and will see limited areas on the 14th of August on U.S. soil. Japanese language cast includes Yuria Nara, Hiroki Doi, Jôji Tokoro, Tomoko Yamaguchi, Yuki Amami, Kazushige Nagashima, Akiko Yano and Shinichi Hatori. The English cast stars Cate Blanchett, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Madison Davenport, Cloris Leachman, Frankie Jonas, Lily Tomlin and Betty White.