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Feature Thousand Words

Struggling to Watch Drive My Car (On Hamaguchi, Ozu and the Importance of Being in the Moment)

I’ve always believed that films should be viewed in one sitting. No pauses, stops or breaks (take that pee before the movie, dummy!). An immersive experience that demands, or, at the very least merits, your full attention for what is a relatively short period of time compared to, say reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace or […]

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Journey Into the Human Heart: Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro

Kikujiro (Kikujiro no natsu, Japan, 1999) is a film about a boy – 9-year-old Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) – who leaves Tokyo in the summer holidays to go in search of his mother, who abandoned him years ago. Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano), the husband of one of his grandmother’s friends, agrees to accompany him on the journey […]

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Social criticism and the inner journey in Battle Royale

In one of the first sequences of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000), a group of boisterous pupils on a bus trip to the countryside arrive at a tunnel entrance: an appropriate place to anticipate the horror which awaits them when they emerge from the darkness at the other end. Stunned by gas, they […]