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Another Christmas is approaching and Ichiyoshi Eita, worker in a chocolate factory, has resigned to the fact that he is going to spend it alone. Until one day, right after deciding to turn his life around and not end up like his penniless senior, a peculiar marble falls from the sky right into his hands. Indeed, it is no ordinary marble, as fiddling with it will spawn an alluring girl in Ichiyoshi’s apartment, who will then multiply herself upon being kissed. Far from being the realization of his wildest fantasy, the young man will have to take on the role of a single father until more is understood about what these four beauties are, and where they came from.

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If anyone ever wondered what would happen if the storyteller behind “As the Gods Will” and “Blue Lock” and the creator...

Sota Fukushi is a Japanese actor. He rose to prominence portraying Gentaro Kisaragi in “Kamen Rider Fourze”, and has since starred in television series Koinaka (2016) and My Lover's Secret (2017), as well as films Strobe Edge (2015), My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday (2016), “Bleach” (2018), “As the Gods Will”, “Blade of the Immortal”, “Laplace's Witch” and others. “Yours” is his directorial debut.

Yours is screening at Short Shorts Film Festival and Asia

The film begins inside an art gallery, where a man and a woman are watching an abstract painting, initially through intense close ups and later on, from further away. An employee dropping some boxes he has been carrying brings them out of their trance, although the woman is nowhere to be found after the break. The next scene takes place inside an apartment where the same young man is looking at a pamphlet of an Employment Support Festival for the Disabled, before the...

In 2020, Naoya Fujita won the Japanese Short Film Competition of Skip City International D-Cinema with “Stay” (2019). Following up in 2022, he directed “Long-Term Coffee Break” (2022) for the New Directions in Japanese Cinema Project. “Confetti” is his first feature film and was produced to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Skip City International D-Cinema Festival and the 90th anniversary of Kawaguchi City. Enough reasons to take a closer look at this exciting new director.

Confetti is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival 2024

Yuki is a high school student living on the road with his father, who is the leader of the Yuhiza Theatre Group. Due to touring, Yuki has to change school almost every month and his life is in constant change marked by various encounters and partings. Coming to town, he is determined to focus on his biggest wish, to become an actor. He is not interested in finding new friends...

The “death game” sub-genre sees ordinary people fight for survival through murderous games, puzzles, and exercises. These heightened stories have become so popular because of their tendency to turn torture and suffering into a twisted form of entertainment — a concept that feels increasingly authentic with each passing year. There are dozens of anime that fit the murderous death game mold between Deadman Wonderland, Danganronpa, and Gantz. However, there are also a handful of series that specifically follow Takashi Miike’s As the Gods Will and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game’s example, where childish recreational games and activities become the competitive tools of these characters’ destruction. Kaiji, Liar Game, Death Parade, Alice in Borderland, and Btooom! all follow this model to some extent. As the Gods Will predates Squid Game by six years, but there’s fascinating crossover between these two death game stories. As the Gods Will is the...

This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s One Piece.

Film and television adaptations of stories from other media consistently face uphill battles. Even the most faithful of adaptations can ruffle the feathers of the source material’s die-hard fans or lead audiences to question the point of the adaptation in the first place. Anime and manga have had an even harder time on this front as their live-action adaptations not only have to figure out how to ostensibly bring cartoons to life, but also take into consideration a multitude of sensitive cultural issues.

Audiences are used to writing off live-action anime adaptations after decades of being burnt by projects like Dragon Ball Evolution, Death Note, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and this year’s Knights of the Zodiac, with live-action versions of Yu Yu Hakusho and My Hero Academia already in development. Even when Japan produces decent live-action anime features like Gintama,...

In 2020, Naoya Fujita won the Japanese Short Film Competition of Skip City International D-Cinema with “Stay” (2019). Following up in 2022, he directed “Long-Term Coffee Break” (2022) for the New Directions in Japanese Cinema Project. “Confetti” is his first feature film and was produced to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Skip City International D-Cinema Festival and the 90th anniversary of Kawaguchi City. Enough reasons to take a closer look at this exciting new director.

Confetti is screening at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival

Yuki is a high school student living on the road with his father, who is the leader of the Yuhiza Theatre Group. Due to touring, Yuki has to change school almost every month and his life is in constant change marked by various encounters and partings. Coming to town, he is determined to focus on his biggest wish, to become an actor. He is not interested in finding new friends...

It may be unfair to refer to filmmaker Takashi Miike as a horror filmmaker, given how prolific he is. Since he first started directing movies in 1991, Miike has accrued 112 directing credits. To save you from doing the math, that averages out to about three and a half films a year. He has made horror movies, yes, including the notable "Audition" in 1999, perhaps his best-known film in the United States. He also directed an episode of "Masters of Horror," as well as "Over Your Dead Body," the original "One Missed Call," the David Lynch-adjacent "Gozu," "Lesson of the Evil," and "As the Gods Will." His polarizing "Visitor Q" might also be considered a horror film depending on your personal interpretation of the premise.

Among those films, however, Miike has also made a superhero film, a partly animated musical, a few historical epics, coming-of-age dramas, and many, many crime movies. One...

Korean TV series have dominated viewing preferences across large parts of Asia for the last decade. But it has taken a high-concept survival drama “Squid Game” to become the first K-drama to rate as Netflix’s top show in the U.S.

The nine-part Netflix original involves a group of people from all walks of life who sign up for a series of simple, but utterly lethal games, organized by mysterious hosts in masks and red overalls. What spurs on the contestants are their own dire straits and the lure of a more than $40 million cash prize.

Released on Sept. 17, the show entered the Top 10 on Sept. 19 at No. 8, climbed to No. 2 the next day, and was at No. 1 by its fourth day of availability on Sept. 21. In its home market of South Korea, “Squid Game” debuted in second place and reached the top spot a day later.

The show...

Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010 films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.Takashi Miike could have become the idea of himself held by many Americans and gotten rich doing it, but his career was always his own. After he indulged one last time in the uncomplicated thrill of homicide-as-spectacle in 13 Assassins (2010), he’d never spill blood the same way. In Miike’s films of the last decade, violence became the director’s way of working through feelings about a world ruled by a rotting morality. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011), Lesson of the Evil (2012), As the Gods Will (2014), and Terra Formars (2016) all reckon with the problems of believing in some greater power or logic, and their findings are bleak. If teachers, gods, governments, and alien life aren’t looking out for us,...

Another Decade with Takashi Miike is a series of essays on the 2010s films of the Japanese maverick, following Notebook's earlier survey of Miike's first decade of the 21st century.As the Gods Will (2014) picks up where Lesson of the Evil (2012) left off, with a massacre at a high school. Again, Takashi Miike is considering the unspeakable—namely, the wholesale slaughter of children in the place we most expect them to be safe—but there are some critical differences this time. Lesson of the Evil followed the perpetrator of an atrocity for months (and about an hour of screen time) before he shot up a high school, thereby acclimating viewers to how terrible he could be; the massacre didn’t seem to come out of nowhere. As the Gods Will, on the other hand, presents a scene of multiple homicide mere minutes after the title cards appear. It’s as...

A trio of recent releases provides further gives proof that East Asian filmmakers know how to get weird better than almost anyone. Find our thoughts below on the bizarre trio of director Niwatsukino Norihiro's monk-rotica Suffering of Ninko (Third Window Films), Miike Takashi's manga adaptation As the Gods Will (FUNimation), and Leo Zhang's bizarro sci-fi Jackie Chan vehicle Bleeding Steel (Lionsgate)....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

With the 22nd annual Fantasia International Film Festival kicks off in Montreal this July, the first wave of programming has now been announced, and as per usual, there are many events for genre fans to look forward to, including the world premiere of the horror anthology Nightmare Cinema, screenings of Unfriended: Dark Web and David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake, and a Lifetime Achievement Award presentation to filmmaker Joe Dante:

Press Release: Montreal, May 2, 2018 - The Fantasia International Film Festival will be celebrating its 22nd Anniversary in Montreal this summer, taking place from July 12-August 1, with its Frontières International Co-Production Market and Industry Rendez-Vous Weekend being held July 19-22.

The festival’s full lineup of over 130 feature films will be announced in early July. In the meantime, Fantasia is excited to reveal a carefully selected first wave of titles, along with several special happenings.

International Premiere Of...

The 13th annual Texas Frightmare Weekend horror convention is about a month away, and the team behind one of the country's best conventions has given ScreenAnarchy a first look at their film festival selections for 2018. In the past, Texas Frightmare Weekend has played host to screenings of films like Neil Jordan's Byzantium, Sushi Typhoon favorites like Helldriver, '80s throwback killers like Kurando Mitsutake's Gun Woman, and many many more exciting projects. This year's lineup is one of their most impressive yet, with a number of features and shorts from all over the world. Filmmakers represented include Miike Takashi with As the Gods Will, Bruno Mattei with Shocking Dark, Claudio Fragasso (who will also be in attendance) with Demons 4, and some exciting indie premieres...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...