Missing Child Videotape (Japan 2024: Dir Ryota Kondo)

Keita Kodama (Sugita Rairu) divides his time between working in a grocery shop, sharing his small flat with psychically gifted room mate Tsukasa Amano (Hirai Amon) and devoting time to assisting in the location of missing persons. When we first meet Keita he's managed to track down a young boy, previously presumed vanished. "Big brother," whispers the rescued child, enigmatically.

The motives for the young man's extra curricular duties are disclosed via a journalist, Mikoto Kuzumi (Kokoro Morita), seeking an interview with Keita via Tsukasa; she enlightens him that thirteen years previously Keita's young brother Hinata had gone missing while the pair were exploring the same area. Keita's guilt over the still absent sibling is not helped by his mother sending him various possessions of his late father, including a video tape, shot by Keita at the point where Hinata disappeared, showing a mysterious and possibly haunted building which had subsequently also vanished.

Kuzumi, who is supposedly writing a positive piece about Keita and the recovered boy, digs deeper and, in classic J-horror fashion, discovers that the area in which the disappearances took place - Mt. Mashiro - has a history of similar incidents. The journalist, Keita and Tsukasa realise that if they are to discover the truth they must journey to the mountain and face their fears.

This is director Kondo Ryota's first feature, developed from a short film of the same name. Ryota's overall production steer comes via Takashi Shimizu, a name that should mean far more to fans of fantastic film than it may do; much of Shimizu's work as a director, outside of his Ju-On: the Grudge movies and 2004's excellent Marebito has failed to achieve a UK theatrical or even physical release.

In summary MCV could be seen as a 'greatest hits' of J-Horror; 'haunted' videotape; isolated rural location; spooky if unresolved narrative. But Kondo takes those elements and inserts them in a film less 'slow' than 'stop' burn; almost score-less, most of the film's scenes progress in near silence, a mood of gloom and despair prevailing throughout. There is a climax of sorts but anyone seeking tidy resolution will be left wanting. If there's a criticism it's that the performances are a little too underplayed to truly take hold, and the film's themes aren't fully developed, but there's no doubting the director's ability to create a mood of ratcheted up creepiness.

Missing Child Videotape plays as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 which takes place in cinemas around the UK from 6 February to 31 March 2026. You can watch the trailer here.

Cloud aka Kuraudo (Japan 2024: Dir Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

While Kurosawa's CV has often dwelt in stories of the strange and unusual, for his latest movie he's concerned with more prosaic matters like, er, the state of consumer society.

Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) - plain Yoshii to his friends, and there aren't many of them - is a young, intelligent man, who supplements his tedious factory day job by making money - quite a lot of money - in the shady, borderline legal world of re-selling, under the name 'Ratel' (literally an aggressive badger). As we meet him he's scalping some unfortunate supplier of medical equipment, unable to shift his stock; so Yoshii takes it off his hands for a ludicrously low price and sells the whole stock on line at a staggering markup (quite why the medical supplier couldn't have done the same thing beats me). 

At work Yoshii's boss recognises his talents and urges him to pursue a management career at the factory, but the part time seller, whose clandestine sideline makes him increasingly paranoid, chooses instead to pack in the day job and relocate to the country with his acquisitive girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), while at the same time ghosting a re-selling friend Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) who's offered him the chance to get rich quick via a new online sales platform.

At their country house an increasingly bored Akiko hopes that their relocation might offer more glamour, instead of the usual sales cycle involving living among piles of boxed goods. Yoshii takes on an assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), keen to learn and obedient. But Yoshii's paranoia remains intact; a broken window at night suggests a prowler, and an ill advised visit to the police to report the crime results only in drawing the authorities' attention to him, a mistake when he starts trading in counterfeit goods. But it's the further knockdown purchase of a set of collectable dolls, again sold online at considerable markup, that tips things over the edge. Those negatively impacted by Yoshii's activities want revenge, and there's safety in numbers.

Until the last few minutes of Cloud, this felt like a slightly fantastically told moral tale. Kurosawa shows us a world where everyone's on the make, inhabiting a grey market arena which is hard, ruthless but perhaps preferable to a day job and a need to be accountable; although there's nothing glamorous about Yoshii's life. Part of the distaste of what Yoshii is doing, irrespective of how glamorous and exciting he sees it, is the constant exploitation of people in a similar economic situation to him.

That the mentioned revenge takes the form of an (over) extended shootout which occupies roughly half the film is baffling, like two movies sandwiched into one. There's no one to root for here; those with whom one might have sympathy - the men exploited by Yoshii - prove equally capable of random violence. And yet the ending suggests that nothing, even right and wrong, is straightforward in our consumer world. It's an odd film where both exploiter and exploited flail around in a world overstuffed with things, knowing, to coin an old phrase, the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Cloud plays in cinemas from 25 April.

Tokyo Ghoul (Japan 2017: Dir Kentarô Hagiwara)

The arrival of Tokyo Ghoul, based on the incredibly popular manga of the same name, comes at the end of a six year success story for the franchise. Originally appearing in serial form in the 'Weekly Young Jump' magazine back in 2011, there have been on line spinoffs and TV adaptations, and while the world waits for a planned anime feature of the sequel Tokyo Ghoul:re, we now have a live action version of the original story. Whew!

Director Kentarô Hagiwara, whose directing CV previously comprised shorts and TV work, has the unenviable and not inconsiderable task of taming the multi tentacled beast (pun intended) that is the 'Tokyo Ghoul' franchise, and condensing it to a mere two hours (similar to Adam Wingard's only partly successful movie adaptation of the Death Note manga last year), while aiming to satisfy both established TG fans and those new to the franchise. Like me.

And I'm pleased to write that he's pulled it off: Tokyo Ghoul is that rare thing, an action film with a profound emotional heart. Masataka Kubota plays Ken Kaneki, a bookish student living in Tokyo, a city whose inhabitants are a mix of humans and ghouls (a form of vampire) living side by side. The ghouls are indistinguishable from their human neighbours until their lust for blood and flesh transforms them into something more nasty (including wings and tentacles, named kagune); ghoul murders are monitored, and the culprits obsessively tracked down by the Commission of Counter Ghoul (sic). Kaneki remains oblivious to the ghoul threat, until he is savagely bitten and stabbed by Rize - a seemingly sweet girl who is in fact 'one of them'. His life is only saved by a combination of falling masonry which lands on the murderous Rize, killing her, and valiant doctors who are able to operate on him by replacing some of his organs. The problem is that the organs previously belonged to newly dead Rize; the result being that Kaneki becomes the first human/ghoul hybrid.

Much of the film is devoted to Kaneki's battle with the rising ghoul within him. This has been done on screen many times before of course, but Kubota's performance here is quite heartbreaking, which I wasn't expecting. Scenes of him attempting, and failing, to remain human by eating 'normal' food are incredibly affecting (assisted by genre favourite Don Davis's stirring score). His adoption by Mr Yoshimura - owner of a ghoul friendly cafe who sources the menu from bodies reclaimed from a nearby suicide forest - is touching but merely adds to his dilemma. Rejected for his lack of ghoul purity by cafe worker Tôka (Fumika Shimizu, excellent) who also struggles to reconcile her outer 'normality' with her inner ghoul, he is literally stuck between two worlds. But with the death of a close friend he is forced to choose a side, and fully embrace the ghoul within him.

Tokyo Ghoul's last half hour sets up more traditional superhero antics - the battling ghouls even have masks - but they are well staged and the time taken by director Hagiwara to establish the characters means that the pyrotechnics have context. This isn't an empty franchise movie of the kind currently clogging up the multiplexes - it's a nuanced film, bringing fresh life to admittedly rather hackneyed themes of alienation and otherness, sensitively scripted by Sui Ishida, adapting his own comics. True, for a TG novice like me there were a few plot elements which confused rather than illuminated, but I look forward to future instalments which will hopefully clarify the story further. Or maybe I should just read the comics? Anyway, go see.