Big Eyes Smart Mouth

I suspect most people's first encounter with Kyōsōgiga is going to be much like mine: first you're confused and frustrated, then you're fascinated, and then finally you're even a little bit moved and awed.

A gorgeous adaptation of the acclaimed manga, and a story with a hard moral question: Who gets to be redeemed?

But there's more to Like The Clouds, Like The Wind than nostalgia or cross-references; it's a fine project in its own right.

The freshman effort from ex-Ghibli creators Studio Ponoc at first seems like a riff on 'Kiki's Delivery Service' or 'Harry Potter' territory, but has morality rather than magic on its mind.

But After the Rain, from Jun Mayuzuki's manga of the same name, isn't about romance, but something subtler and harder to come by.

What I can't complain about, and what makes the movie absolutely worth seeing anyway, is just about everything else in it.

Napping Princess feels like too much and too little at the same time.

A movie this good, there's always another layer to unwrap.

Lustrous's microcosm is a crescent-shaped island somewhere out in the middle of an apparently endless ocean.

Like Wings of Desire, 2001, Night On The Galactic Railroad, or any of the other great works about man's place in the universe, Haibane Renmei inspires more reflection than certainty.

Kaiba is set in a universe that has what I could describe as an alternate ecology.

It's not good, to be sure -- but maybe being its own special kind of bad is more valuable than we think.

The simple algebra for Blade Runner Black Out 2022 is that it's to Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 as an episode of The Animatrix was to The Matrix generally.

Japan's Roaring Twenties are both backdrop and stage for these three excursions into the delirious, the decadent, and the surreal.

A masterwork, not just of period reconstruction and attention to the details of daily life, but also for the ways it navigates through the tricky issues of a story about WWII Japan without stumbling.

There are so many individual things wrong with Netflix's live-action Death Note film that you might as well roll dice to figure out where to start.

The work collected in Astonishing is as wide-ranging as the man who created it.

There's always the chance the live-action 'Gintama' and 'Bleach' movies will be good, but right now they appear to embody the deadliest, most literal sins of such projects.

Outlaw Star mashes together ingredients drawn as much from Westerns and wuxia adventure stories as it does space opera or pulp SF.

A trifle of a film, but it doesn't overstate its importance or overstay its welcome, and it shows how Studio Ghibli gave as much care to stories like this as they did for any of Miyazaki's fantasias