It’s that time of year again: my adoptive hometown of Leeds is gearing up for the 32nd Leeds International Film Festival. Last year, I wrote about the selection of Japanese cinema at LIFF 2017, and I had planned on catching Takeshi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal before the flu struck me down at the last minute. This year, I’ve got my fingers crossed for more Japanese films (as well as some others that have been making waves on the international festival circuit, like Sorry to Bother You and Tigers Are Not Afraid).
This year’s line-up hasn’t been announced yet. The festival programme launches on October 10th. Tickets are free, but need to be booked in advance, for the two screenings of trailers for this year’s event. I’ll be there hoping to catch a glimpse of Shoplifters and One Cut of the Dead.
This fifth instalment again portrays an episodic series of events in which Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) and his infant son are hired from their life on the road to commit an assassination, all the while pursued by the villainous Yagyu clan that schemed to have Ogami cut loose as a 
Humanity
rarely dabbled in reviewing films that I 
cinema I watch. Sometimes I like to highlight other films when they have some crossover with Japan, Japanese culture, or Japanese actors and directors. The South Korean WW2 drama The Battleship Island (2017), from director Ryoo Seung-wan, is just such a film. Set in 1945 on the 
watch. I think it happened when I started massively ramping up the number of films I watch in general. While I might sink tens of hours into a game and would want that time to be well spent, a film is usually over in a couple of hours, and if I didn’t like it, I’d probably be watching another film later that week – perhaps even later that day. And as I’ve written before, even if I walk away from a film disappointed, there’s probably still 
‘70s, as well as ‘contemporary’ films from the early 2000s onwards, but with a few exceptions I haven’t seen many films from the 1980s or 1990s. I’ve been meaning to rectify that, in part by digging into the filmographies of Juzo Itami and Takashi Miike. Miike began directing in the early ‘90s and has been incredibly prolific, typically directing multiple films per year for most of his career and only recently starting to dial it back – while still directing at least a couple of films a year. 
humanity had ceded the earth to 