Festivals: Camera Japan Reviews
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2025 Review: HOW DARE YOU?
The Netherlands have their very own Japanese Film Festival. It's called Camera Japan and is held every year in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. This year, the festival opened with a treat: Korean-Japanese director O Mipo's Futsū no Kodomo, which translates literally...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2024 Review: THE COLORS WITHIN Shines With Bright Hues
Back in 2016-2017, director Yamada Naoko shook up the anime industry with her high-school bully drama A Silent Voice. The film took an uncommonly candid view of life in school, with people often doing stupid things while still totally unaware...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2024 Review: LET'S GO KARAOKE! Unites Audiences!
This year, director Yamashita Nobuhiro (Linda, Linda, Linda, Tamako in Moratorium) was the guest of honor at the Camera Japan Film Festival in Rotterdam. The programme showed no less than five films by him, all of which were released in...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2024 Review: ALL THE SONGS WE NEVER SANG Makes For Fine Family Drama
September in the Netherlands means that the Camera Japan Festival is visiting again, first in Rotterdam and a week later in Amsterdam. Primarily it's a film festival, but music and food always have an important role as well. Often there...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2023 Review: DECEMBER
Courtroom drama films, they are a dime a dozen. The why of it is no mystery: they allow for the telling of excellent stories, twists can be inserted aplenty, and the upcoming verdict carries an automatically incorporated suspense. And for...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2023 Review: NEW RELIGION
Horror comes in different flavors, from fun slashers to controversial gore, but the Japanese have a decidedly special brand, with some very unsettling, creepy productions. Just over 20 years ago this brand became an international craze, after the worldwide breakthrough...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2023 Review: GOLD KINGDOM AND WATER KINGDOM
In the Netherlands, we only get the most successful anime films in the cinema, the record-breakers. For all the others, you need to check the festivals, and thankfully the Camera Japan Festival always has at least a few titles in...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2022: THEY SAY NOTHING STAYS THE SAME Is A Stunning Masterpiece
Apparently, there was some discord between the programmers of Camera Japan this year about Joe Odagiri's drama They Say Nothing Stays the Same. All liked the film but some thought it was too old, having seen its International première way...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2022 Review: THE GREAT YOKAI WAR: GUARDIANS
While Rotterdam's Camera Japan Film Festival sometimes mostly seems to consist of a wide variety of dramas, there are always a few crazy and/or spectacular titles to check out as well. And the festival scores big on both categories by...
Camera Japan Rotterdam 2022 Review: POPRAN, A Dickhead Looking For His Dick
Over four years ago, our very own Josh Hurtado wrote one of the most positive reviews ever published at this here site. Its subject: a low-budget (no-budget rather...) making-of-a-zombie-flick called One-Cut of the Dead by some guy named Ueda Shinichiro....
Camera Japan 2019 Review: RISE OF THE MACHINE GIRLS Doesn't Elevate Its Niche
Back in 2007, our site got one of its highest traffic spikes when we hosted the outrageous trailer for Iguchi Noboru's The Machine Girl. For many people, it was their first exposure to Japan's bloody splattergore genre. And when the...
Camera Japan 2018 Review: DESTINY, THE TALE OF KAMAKURA Is Sugar Sweeeeeeeet...
This year, the Dutch Camera Japan Festival is being held for the 13th time, and to celebrate that, its theme is "superstition and the supernatural". Opening the Rotterdam leg of the festival was Yamazaki Takashi's new fantasy Destiny, The Tale...
Camera Japan 2017 Review: In BEFORE WE VANISH, Kurosawa Kiyoshi Gets Emotional
An alien invasion film, made by Kurosawa Kiyoshi? That almost sounds too good to be true. And it is, kind-of. Yes, there is an alien invasion, but not surprisingly, Kurosawa is not much interested in displays of grand destruction, monsters...
Camera Japan 2017 Review: KODOKU MEATBALL MACHINE Minces A Lot Of Meat
Twelve years ago, a small film called Meatball Machine by directors Yamaguchi Yudai and Yamamoto Yun'ichi made a bloody splash in the festival circuit. In it, you could see two star-crossed loners falling in love with each other, only for...
Camera Japan 2017 Review: Lee Sang-il's RAGE Keeps You Guessing
A lot of films tend to look unpolished, and bland, handheld video is often accepted to be good enough it seems. Not so with the films of Lee Sang-il, which look as bright and shiny as if the visuals have...
Camera Japan 2017 Review: LOVE AND OTHER CULTS Minds The Details
It's fair to say that ever since his Greatful Dead was released, we've been fans of director Uchida Eiji. That film presented a decidedly offbeat look at Japanese society, and Uchida showed he wasn't afraid to use pitch-black comedy and...
Camera Japan 2017 Review: NAPPING PRINCESS (aka. ANCIEN AND THE MAGIC TABLET)
Japanese director Kamiyama Kenji has been around in the anime landscape for decades, also as writer, artist, animator, and producer. Peer carefully and you can find his name on the credits of titles like Akira and Roujin-Z already. He is...
Camera Japan 2015 Review: OUR LITTLE SISTER Shows The Cold Through Blissful Warmth
For years now, Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu has been making films which have an uncommonly humanist core. Often emotional, sometimes openly feel-good even, his films somehow never become the saccharine dross they would undoubtedly be in lesser hands. One of...
Camera Japan 2015 Review: RYUZO AND HIS SEVEN HENCHMEN Banks On Old Farts
Takeshi Kitano's latest film Ryuzo and His Seven Henchmen merges the famous director's two favorite movie genres: comedy and gangster thriller. Gathering a slew of older actors from his earlier films, Kitano pitches his geriatric protagonists as a group against...
Camera Japan 2014 Review: FORMA Demands Attention
(This review won't scratch the surface, and that is fully intentional...) At the start of Forma, you see one of its protagonists stick a pen in a cardboard box, making a small hole. She then puts the box on her...
