‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Ryusuke Hamaguchi Delivers A Constantly Surprising, Intellectually Agile Film – Venice Film Festival

Animation Is Film revealed Thursday that its 2023 edition next month will open with Gkids and Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron, the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki that just opened the Toronto Film Festival. It is getting its U.S. Imax premiere at TCL’s Chinese 6.

McKinley Franklin editor Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” will open Animation Is Film on Oct. 18 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in the festival’s first IMAX premiere, the organization announced Thursday. The Animation Is Film Festival, sponsored by Variety, will run from Oct.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including “Tokyo Story” and “Late Spring,” has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film “An Autumn Afternoon” – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute. But it falls to October’s Tokyo International Film Festival to put on this year’s biggest and most comprehensive reconstruction of Ozu’s surprisingly varied career. Working in conjunction with the National Film Archive of Japan, the festival will present an extensive retrospective that covers almost all the films that Ozu directed (TIFF/NFAJ Classics: Ozu Yasujiro Week) from Oct. 24-29. Ozu spent his entire career, from camera assistant in 1923 to renown director in 1962, as an employee of major Japanese studio Shochiku, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement brought. While Ozu is best known for his stripped-down dramas, often centered on family relationships, sometimes troubled or contentious, involving parents and young or grown-up children, many hinging on questions of marriage, generational misunderstandings or the loneliness of the elderly, the director’s register may not entirely have been of his own choosing. “The apparent consistency of the post-war films surely owes as much to this production situation as to Ozu’s aesthetic choices,” wrote critic Tony Rayns in a recent Sight & Sound portrait.

Vanessa Redgrave To Be Feted At European Film Awards

Refresh for latest…: Warner Bros/New Line’s The Nun II continued to conjure strong business around the globe this weekend, taking the top spot again worldwide and overseas. The sophomore session of $30.1M in 72 offshore markets brings the international box office cume to $102.3M and worldwide to $158.8M so far.

Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” stirred up no end of controversy when it was released in 1988, met with protests and condemned by religious groups, while a terrorist attack in a Paris theatre showing the film injured 13 people.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Korean crime-action webtoon “Knuckle Girl” is being adapted as an original film production for Amazon’s Prime Video. It is structured as a Korea-Japan co-venture. The narrative revolves around a promising woman boxer, Ran, who takes on school bullies and participates in illegal bouts.

Unassuming Japanese master Ryusuke Hamaguchi was jolted into the dehumanizing glare of the Oscar machine after “Drive My Car” became an unexpected cause célèbre a few years ago. That generational masterpiece saw him ascend to the pinnacle of instant and unanimous global adoration and forged a salivating fanbase eagerly anticipating his subsequent work.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The political backlash surrounding Agnieszka Holland’s Venice Special Jury Prize-winning refugee drama “Green Border” hasn’t kept the movie from being a hot seller. The film explores the injustice and terror perpetrated at the Polish-Belarusian border from the perspective of refugees, Polish activists and border guards.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Elysian Film Group, Anonymous Content and Bleecker Street have jointly acquired the U.K. rights to “The Boy and the Heron,” the first film from legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki in a decade. Elysian Film Group will release the film in U.K.

Japan’s Visual Industry Promotion Organization (VIPO) and Japan Film Commission have announced details of a new incentives program for offshore film and TV productions shooting in the country. 

The Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion has been given to a winner!

Great Absence, the second feature film from Japanese director Kei Chika-ura, is receiving its world premiere in Toronto International Film Festival’s Platform section. Inspired by Kei’s real-life experiences, the film tells the story of an actor living in Tokyo who is forced to travel home when the police call to say his father is suffering from dementia and has lost touch with reality. Making matters worse, his father’s second wife appears to be missing. The actor makes the trip home with his own wife, full of conflicted emotions over a man who left the family when he was still a child, and starts an exploration into the mysteries of his father’s life.

In cinema, few names are as iconic as Hayao Miyazaki, and his latest adventure carries the weight of expectation. Drawing inspiration from the mysticism of Japanese folklore and grounded in the pain of personal loss, The Boy and the Heron, which opened the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, is a visual spectacle that rekindles the art of 2D animation in an era dominated by the digital.

Late Oscar-winning Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was celebrated at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday with the Out Of Competition premiere of concert film Opus.

Busan International Film Festival (BIFF, October 4-13) has unveiled its full line-up, including opening and closing films, and announced that Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat has been named as Asian Filmmaker of the Year. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Busan International Film Festival put aside many of its recent internal and local political problems to Tuesday unveil a large selection ranging from bleeding edge art titles to international festival favorites. “The difficult times are not behind us, but hard work has made this year’s festival better than ever,” said programmer and interim festival chief Nam Dong-chul, speaking at an online press conference. International guests expected to attend the festival include Luc Besson, Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, Japanese directors Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Korean Americans Justin Chon (“Gook”) and Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”). Hong Kong-based superstar Chow Yun-fat has been named as Busan’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year and will be in person to receive the award.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest, Evil Does Not Exist, received a 7-minute, 50-second ovation at its Venice Film Festival world premiere on the Lido on Monday. The applause for the director of last year’s Best International Feature Oscar winner Drive My Car only ended when Hamaguchi and his team got up to leave.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The mythology around Japan as a nation of everyday ghosts — where the living and the dead share space, occasionally in view of each other — can lead certain western filmmakers into dubious territory: If you don’t recall how Gus van Sant floundered with the mawkish, condescending exoticism of “The Sea of Trees,” trust that it’s best forgotten. Centered on a long-grieving Frenchwoman who finally makes peace with her husband’s death over the course of a Japanese work trip, “Sidonie in Japan” risks similar pitfalls — but Élise Girard’s droll, bittersweet romance mostly dodges them with grace and good humor, plus a pointed awareness of the limitations of its outsider perspective.

When Venice head Alberto Barbera announced his competition lineup in July, he confessed that he and his selection team were surprised to see one submission in their database: a feature project by Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.