Early on in Detective Story, there’s a scene where the title character bumps into his secretary on the street. He’s working undercover (which consists solely of an awful wig; he hasn't changed from
"I think that human beings are under some sort of spell. I want to be released from that."–Takashi Miike Since he is frequently places his camera at a distance from the characters—giving them a roomy
An added bonus of discovering Takashi Miike’s films on DVD is following the director’s progress through special-feature interviews, which are often as entertaining as the films themselves. A deadpan
Zebraman is a love letter to genre entertainment that's not at all generic in its sentiment. It's a superhero movie, as the title suggests, but it has to grow into one: It starts out, more or less
To begin with the obvious: Izo is one of the most difficult works of art to be made in recent times. Viewers complain that it’s overlong and incoherent—and, in their defense, it often feels designed
Whereas some make movies for themselves and others make them for the audience, Takashi Miike—who has gone on the record saying that he doesn't believe there's such a thing as a single "audience" and
The premise of Graveyard of Honor—the rise and fall of a mad-dog gangster—is a familiar one, traced as early as The Public Enemy in 1931, if not earlier. What makes it different from most of its
This piece was co-written with Ben Sachs. *** Here’s one of Takashi Miike’s favorite directorial techniques: let the shot go on for too long. The usual approach is to roll, call “action,” have the
Perhaps it’s best to start at the end. After a perfunctory showdown (a two-on-two variation on the end of Dead or Alive [Takashi Miike, 1999]) in which the film’s antiheroes appear to be killed, Deadly
Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive 2: Birds (2000) alternates between ultraviolent scenes of yakuza war and a tender story set around a country orphanage. While there are countless action movies with a
Takashi Miike's body of work encompasses the most diverse approaches to filmmaking of any director alive today, from direct-to-video police dramas to avant-garde art movies. On top of this, Miike seems