Ichi: The High School Years. In this low-budget live-action prequel to Ichi the Killer we get to see how Ichi was picked on in high school and eventually turned into a psychopathic sadist...

Hello! Project members Miki Fujimoto and Rika Ishikawa star in this run of the mill coming of age teen drama and do about as good a job as can be done in a drama without any actual conflict or major problems to be dramatic about...

2LDK is a film about the escalation of hostility between two female roommates up for the same acting role. They go from trading passive-aggressive comments to bludgeoning each other with common household objects in this absurd-yet-captivating dark comedy...

The phrase "no honor among thieves" never seemed more relevant than it does in this light-hearted comedy. A team of swindlers plan out elaborate ways to scam people out of their hard-earned cash. Paranoia sets in as they try to prevent their takings from vanishing on the train ride home...

A timid car rental employee and a strait-laced nurse run off with a suitcase full of yakuza cash and have fun spending it. You could probably make a drinking game out of all the clichés found in Adrenaline Drive, but in the end it's just too charming to mind...

A mixture of fiction and real life accounts of personal memories, After Life chronicles the process of choosing just one memory from the life which has just ended to keep forever, and how profoundly that process can affect the people involved...

A trio of students at prestigious St. Michael's Academy who'd much rather be eating chicken ramen than participating in the aristocratic atmosphere of their surroundings are granted super powers to combat a gang of Italian kidnappers. It's hard to believe such a quirky manga could be adapted to live-action so smoothly, but Arch Angels does an amazing job.

The slow pace of The Blessing Bell may put some people off, but if you're able to look past it there's a lot to take away from this quirky yet brilliant little film...

Initially Blister is an interesting and quirky story about the pitfalls of otaku obsession but toward the end it stumbles on itself and fizzles out...

Contrary to popular belief, Bounce Ko Gals is not a pink film. Nor is it a raucous teen whore comedy. It's more of a coming of age drama, and a fairly good one at that...

A brilliantly effective commentary on generational shifts. Bright Future makes a point without beating you over the head with it. In fact I had to watch it twice just to notice there was a point.

This is probably one of the stupidest, most ridiculous movies you'll ever see... but in a good way...

It may not be poignant (or even commonsensical for that matter) but it's often ridiculously funny...

Cutie Honey isn’t exactly a tour de force in cinematic excellence but it has a certain winsome charm that makes it genuinely humorous...

Tak Sakaguchi is back in the woods beating hordes of nondescript enemies senseless for our amusement. It doesn't get much better than that...

Originally broadcasted as a special on BS Fuji, A Delicious Way to Kill is an openly goofy yet hilarious spoof of the murder mystery genre...

Before I watched Demon Hunting I wondered how a distributor could get away with marketing episodes of a TV series as individual movies. After watching it I wondered how the heck an episode of a TV series this awful got on TV in the first place...

Ryuhei Kitamura's first movie consisted of a small group of film geeks running around in the woods being sprayed with copious amounts of red-colored corn syrup. Adjust your expectations accordingly...

At times the unrelenting futility presented in Dragon Head can be tiresome, but with that futility comes an uplifting message of perseverance...

While not *quite* as blatantly absurd as The Calamari Wrestler, Minoru Kawasaki's Executive Koala manages to accurately parody just about every dramatic genre even though the main character is a koala bear in a business suit.

Two and a half hours of complete and utter confusion, and for some inexplicable reason I loved every minute of it - even the intermission.

Ghost Gate redefines awful filmmaking in ways I never would have thought possible. I'm just proud of myself for getting through this entire review without using the word "bukakke"...

A man wakes up in a dark concrete cavern without any memory of how he got there. In what basically amounts to a 49-minute claustrophobic nightmare of bodily pain and mental torment, Haze still manages to inspire the audience's imagination.

Uncompromisingly brutal yet completely enthralling. Ichi the Killer is required viewing for any Asian extreme cinema fan who's capable of sitting through it...

Takashi Miike's contribution to the Masters of Horror series, Imprint, is almost a parody of the kind of movie the uninitiated amongst the American audience might expect from him. Instead of shying away from those expectations, he instead chose to take it even further...

At its worst Izo could be seen as a plodding exercise in monotonous brutality, but at its best it could be considered genius in its intent...

The film that launched a franchise. Ju-On: The Curse had a nearly non-existent budget but still managed to be more unsettling than any of the Grudge movies that followed it...

At first glance you may wonder why the makers of Ju-On 2 couldn't have just edited it together with Ju-On 1, considering it was filmed at the same time and is essentially only 40 minutes long - but once you watch it you'll probably be glad they didn't...

Ju-On: The Grudge is not quite as good as the original Ju-On, but it's still head and shoulders above most others in the flooded vengeful ghost genre...

If you only see 20 movies about curses killing teenage girls in your life, Ju-Rei: The Uncanny should probably be one of them. I guess...

Kids Return manages to be a coming of age drama where the main characters never really change for the better, and yet somehow we're left feeling good about that...

It could just be the previous Laguna Productions releases mercilessly pounding my J-horror standards into submission, but this one wasn't half as bad as I expected it to be. Still kinda bad though...

A deeply moving drama that gets you completely emotionally invested in two characters you know hardly anything about, and then leaves the rest up to you...

Longinus is a well-shot interesting short film which conveys its message effectively, but it's difficult to overlook the fact that it could have been so much more...

It initially seems like derivative J-Horror fare, but this film has a heart as well as a powerful ending...

The good news is Moon Child was a whole lot better than I was expecting from a film co-written by and starring J-pop idol Gackt. The bad news is I wasn't expecting all that much from a film co-written by and starring J-pop idol Gackt...

Sort of a romantic comedy for nerds, Otakus in Love is a frenetic romp through a highly-exaggerated world of manga fan obsession. It’s unapologetically fun, charming, and completely insane all at the same time...

Although Rampo Noir occasionally suffers from a bad case of unmitigated pretentiousness, in the end the four directors involved are all able to weave Edogawa Rampo's tales in such a way as to leave a lasting effect on the audience...

Stop me if you heard this one before. Takashi Shimizu directing a movie where a guy brutally kills his family and they come back as vengeful ghosts. Well, luckily it's not quite that simple...

Admittedly my expectations shot up a bit too high when I found out the premise involved Aki Maeda as a cyborg war machine, but I still can't help thinking this one could have been so much cooler.

If you give a Japanese movie based on teenagers a name like "School Day of the Dead", there better be some ghosts and/or zombies involved. Unfortunately this one has neither, or much else worth mentioning for that matter.

Even a fairly lame ending couldn't ruin what can only be described as a surreal and beautifully unique cinematic experience.

Swing Girls takes a fairly simplistic idea and presents it in a superbly cute and funny way. What more could you need?

Gore, zombies, swords, guns, yakuza, marial arts, and plenty of dark comedy to go around... all in one movie!...

Vibrator is a simple yet touching story about a quickie relationship between a lonely woman who wears her emotions on her sleeve no matter how hard she tries not to and a self-confident truck driver who turns out to be every bit as lonely as she is...

Who's Camus Anyway? does an amazing job at being an ode to film geeks and anyone interested in the filmmaking process, however when we're bombarded with all the minutia of the characters' personal lives in a clunky attempt to draw certain parallels, things get slightly excruciating…

The five members of pop group Arashi star in this drama about a group of friends who move live together in Tokyo during the summer of 1963 and pursue their artistic careers. What this film lacks in excitement it more than makes up for in quality acting and the charming ambience its setting provides.