"A Man" leads the Japan Academy Film Nominations

by Nathaniel R

"A Man" received 13 nominations from the Japanese Academy.

Last year the Japan Academy Film prizes were had a slightly higher profile on this side of the pond due to the international success of Drive My Car (which was also popular with Oscar voters). This year, there's no Japanese breakout film unless you count popular anime titles but it's still worth sharing what the Japan Academy is loving. With 13 nominations Kei Ishiwaka's A Man (which premiered at Venice) is the film to beat and it's worth noting that it came out after the deadline for the Oscar submissions this year [updated] and also wasn't submitted by Japan in the new Oscar season. The Japanese ceremony was two days before the Oscars this year on March 10th. Here are the nominees and UPDATED TO INCLUDE THE WINNERS AFTER THE JUMP...

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30 Biggest Subtitled Hits (and where to watch them)

Our daily "Year in Review" lists have begun!

Even before the pandemic, box office reporting was becoming more secretive. Netflix was the chief disruptor since their Oscar hopefuls got theatrical releases but numbers were never reported. Other streaming distributors followed and once you added in the increasing regularity of movies simultaneously doing theatrical (generally reported) and VOD (generally not reported) it was chaos. The COVID-19 pandemic was the ultimate disruptor of course, changing global viewing habits, by virtue of Father Time. International cinema in the US has been increasingly demoted to streaming-only since adult audiences have been the toughest to lure back to the theaters. That said there are subtitled pictures that played theatrically this year and we wanted to honor them by noting the success stories...

Curiously the only foreign country that habitually reports big box office numbers in the US is India but those numbers are often reported as "estimates" in the way, say, European titles didn't tend to be. Furthermore Indian pictures, RRR being an obvious exception, don't tend to get much US media coverage even though they sell tickets, at least in specific areas of the country which makes it all kind of confusing in terms of "what is a success?".  But here are the numbers that were reported, some surely more accurately than others. The numbers are primarily drawn from two sites (box office mojo and the numbers). Titles with up arrows are still in theaters 

TOP 33 SUBTITLED HITS OF 2022 AT THE US BOX OFFICE
Rank for the calendar year / Movie Title / $ Estimate Domestic Gross / $ Global Gross
Figures updated as of 01/15/23

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Review: "Inu-Oh", a punk riot and true spectacle

by Nathaniel R

Last week we had the pleasure of an invitation to the East Coast premiere of the anime rock opera Inu-Oh, which opens in theaters today. It's distributed by GKids, a company which has long championed non-Hollywood animation for US audiences who we all know can be stubbornly myopic about animation, viewing it as a genre rather than a medium capable of all kinds of genres and visual experiences. The screening was at Japan Society here in Manhattan. I bring this up primarily because I had somehow never been there and must highly recommend the venue which has monthly screenings of both anime films and acclaimed live action Japanese films, too (recent films included everything from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke to the kaiju film Mothra, to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha).  Seeing specialty films, which generally play to tiny arthouse crowds, in a beautiful respectful context to a large packed crowd is always a thrill (one of the reasons film festivals, never lose their thrill).

And Inu-Oh deserves a big screen so don't wait until streaming if it hits a theater near you...

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Venice Diary #07 - "The Last Duel" and the last movies of the fest

by Elisa Giudici

Michael Myers is back in "Halloween Kills"

Final day!  I hope you are ready because in this entry I am going to cover all the movies I saw in the last two days of the Venice Film Festival. Eight movies, from European arthouse cinema to Hollywood blockbusters, with some solid performances, an instant cult, and the only major disappointment of this incredible edition of the Mostra.

I'll try to keep it short because of the lack of sleep. An inside joke between my roommate and me this year was that the Filipino movie with its 208 minutes of length lasted longer than our typical night of sleep in the last two weeks...

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