REEL | Timothée Chalamet Challenges 'Marty Supreme'

"I'm the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Marty Supreme, the eldest Safdie brother, Josh Safdie's second solo-directed film—after the younger Benny's own debut in The Smashing Machine, also an unconventional sports drama from A24, earlier this year—starring Timothée Chalamet (also a producer), is set in the world of championship table tennis in 1950s New York City. Chalamet portrays a fictional hotshot star player, Marty Mauser, on the rise, based on real-life Jewish-American ping-pong hustler, Marty Reisman.

GENRE | Finally 'Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair' – Pure Uncut Revenge

"Tear that bitch apart!"

Lionsgate / Cineplex Pictures

The one and only Quentin Tarantino finally reassembles his fourth film (split in half but counted as one by its director and star), the two-volume Uma Thurman-starring revenge actioner into one four-and-a-half-hour magnum opus of uncut martial arts ultraviolence, retitled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.

REEL | Dwayne Johnson Defeats 'The Smashing Machine' x TIFF 2025

"Am I going to hurt him before he hurts me?"

Toronto International Film Festival

Superstar Dwayne Johnson (also a producer) makes his much-hyped, serious dramatic turn in one-half of the Safdie brothers and newly solo writer/director Benny Safdie's tender biographical sports drama, The Smashing Machine (titled after the 2002 HBO documentary of the same name), chronicling the highs and lows of mixed martial arts pioneer and former UFC/Pride FC fighting champion Mark Kerr between 1997 and 2001 during the height of his addiction to opiod painkillers.

SCREEN | Denzel Washington and Spike Lee Kidnap 'Highest 2 Lowest'

"All money ain't good money!"

Apple Original Films / A24

Legendary African-American cinematic duo, director Spike Lee and star Denzel Washington, reteam for their fifth film collaboration in the virtuosic English-language neo-noir crime thriller remake of Akira Kurosawa's moralistic 1963 Japanese police procedural, High and Low, itself loosely adapted from American author Evan McBain's mystery novel King's Ransom. Highest 2 Lowest supercharges its own fresh Black touches about being removed from the culture you helped build after the isolation of immense success.

VIFF 2024 | Eiko Ishibashi Live x A 'Gift' Does Exist x Rio Theatre

"Water always flows downhill."

Vancouver International Film Festival

Commercial Drive—(October 1, 2024) Talented Japanese singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist composer Eiko Ishibashi performed her affecting live soundtrack score for VIFF Live's special presentation of Oscar-winning auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's wordless Evil Does Not Exist companion film Gift at the Rio Theatre earlier this month.

CABLE | Rashida Jones Mourns A 'Sunny' Disposition on Apple TV+

"I'd robot murder someone for this chair alone."

A24 Television

Actress/filmmaker Rashida Jones stars in the oddball dark sci-fi comedy, Sunny, based on the 2018 novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan. Set in Kyoto, series creator Katie Robbins establishes a vaguely tech-centric future where A.I.-programmed domestic robot companions (called "homebots") are commonplace throughout Japanese society but might have troubling (possibly murderous) unknown motivations when not otherwise being helpful, doing mundane tasks.

SCREEN | On Tamio Wakayama's Life 'Between Pictures' x DOXA 2024

"My boyhood years were a kaleidoscope of joy and pain."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Multimedia artist Cindy Mochizuki chronicles the remarkable life and career of the Japanese-Canadian photographer in Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama. Told through the framework of Wakayama's own family history of being imprisoned in internment camps, the Telus documentary follows his tireless efforts to capture the 1960s civil rights movement in the American South.

GRUB | Marugame Udon x Grand Opening x Crosstown

Crosstown—(March 15, 2024) World-famous Japanese noodle restaurant chain Marugame Udon officially opened its very first location in Canada, alongside a thousand other outlets worldwide, last week after a wildly successful initial run—already among the top 5% of all Marugame shops—starting in late February.

CABLE | 'Shōgun' Battles Samurai Lords on FX

"Why tell a dead man the future?"

FX Productions

Shōgun, the exciting new FX series (first adapted in 1980) based on the 1975 novel of historical fiction of the same name by Australian-born British WWII prisoner of war James Clavell and created by married screenwriters Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, explores the late isolationist Sengoku period of feudal Japan during the turn of the seventeenth-century when only capitalist Portuguese Catholics had access to the closed island empire nation in a sweeping samurai epic.

SCREEN | Such 'Perfect Days' Cleaning Toilets x TIFF 2023

"Next time is next time. Now is now."

Toronto International Film Festival

Renowned German filmmaker Wim Wenders directs the slice-of-life Japanese tale Perfect Days about the everyday value and life-affirming joy of hard work. Starring acting great Koji Yakusho as a middle-aged public washroom cleaner for the Tokyo Toilet Project, we follow his repetitive daily habits and routine.

REEL | 'Godzilla Minus One' Destroys Post-War Japan

"This country never changes."

Toho

Blockbuster Japanese filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki completely refreshes the legendary kaiju monster franchise in a lean action drama focused on Tokyo's immediate aftermath of post-WWII nuclear war trauma. Set during the late 1940s, Godzilla Minus One is a total blast in its sobering throwback to the original's barebones roots.

VIFF 2023 | How Does 'The Boy and the Heron' Live?

"All grey herons are liars."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2023—Legendary 82-year-old Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki emerges from his self-imposed retirement for a new, deeply personal film ten years in the making, The Boy and the Heron (aka How Do You Live?). A dreamlike elegy of wartime grief, the Studio Ghibli fantasy adventure is a dazzling, often confounding animated feature of childhood escapism.

VIFF 2023 | Japanese Serenity – 'Evil Does Not Exist' in the Woods

"Balance is key."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2023—Academy Award-winning Drive My Car filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi leaves the city and highways behind as he explores rural life in a bucolic Japanese mountain village, politely fighting capitalist forces in the elusive tone poem of a slow burn ecological drama Evil Does Not Exist (aka Aku wa Sonzai Shinai).

VIFF 2023 | 'Seagrass' Counsels A Couples Therapy Retreat

"I'm actually not cut out for motherhood."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2023—Vancouver actress turned filmmaker Meredith Hama-Brown makes her feature directorial debut in the low-key, early-'90s British Columbia-set relationship drama Seagrass. Her film quietly explores personal dissatisfaction through two interracial couples who meet at a couples therapy retreat on Gabriola Island.

SCREEN | Randall Park Goes Long on 'Shortcomings'

"Change is hard for assholes like us."

Sony Pictures Classics / Mongrel Media

Comedian Randall Park makes his directorial debut behind the camera in the slacker comedy Shortcomings, about the Asian-American male gaze, based on the 2007 graphic novel of the same name by The New Yorker cartoonist Adrian Tomine, who also scripted the film adaptation. Its title is a reference to the limitations of both modern (interracial) dating culture as well as romance or relationships within one's own race.

CABLE | Steven Yeun and Ali Wong Settle Their 'Beef' on Netflix

"Western therapy doesn't work on the Eastern minds."

A24 Television

Tuca & Bertie co-stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong reteam for creator Lee Sung Jin's towering feud dark comedy series, Beef. Both leads are exceptionally dynamic, sizzling in their broad emotional range as dramatic performers. It's hard to telegraph where the strange action of the show is heading as Lee inserts a ton of situational surprises from episode to episode.

GENRE | Brad Pitt Derails A Killer Ride – 'Bullet Train'

"You look like every white homeless guy I've ever seen."

Sony Pictures / 87North Productions

Brad Pitt stars in his former stunt double turned hotshot director David Leitch's action-packed hitman comedy, Bullet Train, based on Japanese author Kōtarō Isaka's crime thriller novel, Maria Beetle. Full of oddball assassin mythology about the violent Japanese underworld, Pitt's jovial but hapless snatch-and-grab criminal, codenamed "Ladybug", gets in way over his head by accidentally stumbling into an international blood feud—imagine John Wick (which Leitch co-directed) but as a comedy set on a high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

GRUB | Aburi Market x Opening x Ambleside x West Van

"Aburi Market is going to be a new kind of grocery experience."

North Shore—(May 30, 2022) Aburi Restaurants (operators of Miku and Miniami) opened up its new premium Japanese specialty supermarket concept Aburi Market in the heart of West Vancouver's oceanfront Ambleside neighbourhood.

CABLE | 'Pachinko' Spans Generations of Koreans in Japan on Apple TV+

"She will thrive."

Media Res

Based on Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's bestselling historical epic novel of the same name, Pachinko is a breathless adaptation celebrating the quiet multigenerational sacrifice of Korean women set against the backdrop of Japanese colonialism throughout the twentieth century.

CABLE | 'Tokyo Vice' Investigates the Ghosts of Japan

"A man without enemies is no man at all."

Endeavor Content

Tony Award-winning New York playwright J.T. Rogers adapts the memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, written by his childhood friend, American expatriate journalist Jake Adelstein, chronicling his experiences as a non-Japanese crime reporter covering the Yakuza in the 1990s. Tokyo Vice alternates between being a captivating investigative journalism procedural and a layered organized crime drama about the ghosts of Japanese society.