Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was supposed to be 2013’s The Wind Rises, a World War II movie about a man who loves building airplanes but struggles to accept the destruction they bring.
Strobe lights, heavy bass, top-shelf drugs, lingerie-clad revelers gyrating in lustful ecstasy—at first glance, a kinky, decadent rave scene feels far from the 19th-century world of Edgar Allan Poe. But in Netflix’s adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s just one set piece that works to cleverly bring the author’s work into contemporary times.
Admittedly, I was suspicious of Joy Ride. The past few years have seen more and more Asian American films in typical Hollywood genres such as rom-coms, superhero blockbusters, and slow-burn dramas. Many have been excellent, some not so much, but in several of them I’ve noticed a recurring theme: a protagonist’s overidealized return to Asia. Joy Ride, a new film about an Asian American adoptee and her friends going to China, seemed primed to replay the trope.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Succession.“The journey we went on with the amniocentesis after what the blood test showed us—everything looks healthy.” With these understated words uttered by a doctor over the phone, we learned in Episode 4 of Succession’s final season that Shiv Roy (played beautifully by Sarah Snook) was pregnant. But in the episodes that followed, the show hardly acknowledged her impending motherhood.
Of all the characters on Abbott Elementary, there’s one who never fails to make me laugh. I’m talking about Mr. Johnson, the janitor whose dry humor and droll facial expressions make him one of the funniest personas on ABC’s hit comedy. Here’s what we know about Mr. Johnson: He’s probably in his 70s. He’s worked at Abbott forever, his institutional knowledge rivaling that of the longest-tenured teachers.
This story contains some spoilers for all three seasons of Derry Girls.After three uproarious seasons, Derry Girls, a television show about four teenage girls and one teenage boy living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has ended.
Spirited Away came out in 2001, when I was 8. After watching it in a Japanese cineplex, I stumbled out into a wall of late-summer heat, shaken by what I had just seen: the grotesque transformation of parents into pigs, the vomiting faceless monsters, the evolution of a sniveling girl to a brave heroine. The way a dragon could be a boy magician and also a river, how the story seemed held together by association and magic.
In recent years, the subject of language has been prominent on American movie-award stages. In 2020, Lee Isaac Chung’s gorgeous family drama Minari was controversially nominated for best foreign-language film at the Golden Globes despite being in both English and Korean and dealing with the very American experiences of isolation and immigration.
NAGOYA, Japan—Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables. I am sitting in a cardboard cubicle at a counter inside a ramen shop, rehearsing my order in my head over and over again. My sister is in the next cubicle over—all I can see is the top of her head—and later I will learn that she is doing the exact same thing.