News

The big movie studios opted out of San Diego Comic-Con 2023, meaning the event didn't have all the air sucked up by the next big Marvel Cinematic Universe news for once. One of the most exciting announcements was "Lazarus," a new sci-fi thriller anime from Shinichirō Watanabe and Studio Mappa.

The announcement came with a teaser trailer; Watanabe's animes always have a musical theme and it looks like "Lazarus" will have the same jazzy score as "Bebop" (this time performed by saxophonist Kamasi Washington). Rather than a U.S. import like most anime, "Lazarus" will premiere on Toonami (the production team is aiming to be finished by the end of 2024). The American influence doesn't stop there, for the action scenes will be designed by "John Wick" director Chad Stahelski. Watanabe crafts animated action with unrivaled fluidity, so him and Stahelski working together is a dream team.

Even before this project,...

Poppy tunes open Vo Thanh Hoa’s screen adaptation of Kenji Uchida’s “Key of Life” (2012), following the first action scene that introduces one of the film’s three key characters – Thach (Kieu Minh Tuan), a notorious assasin who’s seen completing his task and then disappearing from the crime scene. In just a couple of minutes he will shake of a bunch of armed criminals by swiftly changing roles from one type of servant to the other, to be ridiculously defeated by a simple bar of soap. Just like in Kenji’s original, the fantom assasin gets knocked unconscious in a bath house, and wakes up with amnesia and a wrong locker key in his hand, logically believing to be someone else.

Chìa Khoá Trăm Tỷ (A Hundred Billion Key) has opened in 50 major U.S. theaters nationally on Friday, Oct 28th.

Thach starts living...

Specialty distributor 3388 Films has set an October 28 U.S. theatrical release for Vietnamese comedy A Hundred Billion Key. The movie will have its North American premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival a week prior on October 19. Check out the trailer below.

From actor-turned-director Võ Thanh Hoà, Chìa Khoá Trăm Tỷ (A Hundred Billion Key) is adapted from Kenji Uchida’s award-winning 2012 Japanese film Key of Life. The story follows a notorious assassin who unexpectedly loses his memory and his fortune at the local bathhouse, setting in motion a new life of surprises. Kiều Minh Tuấn, Thu Trang, Jun Vũ and Anh Tú star.

Produced by Orange Films, A Hundred Billion Key originally debuted in Vietnam during Lunar New Year last February, marking the return of movies to cinemas after Covid closures. It opened at No. 1 going on to gross over 70B Vnd (3M). Newport Beach has selected it...

Japanese filmmaker Kenji Uchida hit the jackpot when he wrote and directed in 2012 “Key of Life”, a clever, enjoyable and very applicable story of identity-swap between a looser and a sleek professional assassin, played by the star Teruyuki Kagawa. The film in fact, beside winning a bunch of awards, had a South Korean remake in 2015, “Lucky Key” starring the uber-popular Yoo Hae-jin in the lead role, and this year, a Chinese reboot opened successfully across China on Spring Festival (Chinese New Year Holiday), one of the busiest moviegoing periods in China, grossing a record 7.8 billion yuan only in the festival days. This newest big budget version is directed by Xiaozhi Rao after his 2018’s “A Cool Fish” featuring no other than Hong Kong icon and superstar Andy Lau (also credited as executive producer ) and Xiao Yang, recently seen in “Sheep Without A Shepherd”.

Endgame is screening at Udine Far East...

Production in China has got underway on a Mandarin-language remake of hit Japanese comedy “Key of Life.” The plot involves a failed actor who swap identities with a stranger, only to discover that the man is a top assassin.

The original film was produced and distributed by leading Japanese indie The Klockworx – along with production committee members including King Records, Dentsu and TV Asahi — in 2012. It was acquired for North American release by Film Movement.

“The original ‘Key of Life’ was a black comedy with both the story and the characters bordering on the absurd. The Chinese version will make the characters more local, but the essential structure of the screenplay will be kept intact,” a spokesman for production company Shanghai Artown Film told Variety.

The original screenplay written by director Kenji Uchida won prizes at the Kinema Junpo Awards, the Japan Academy and the Shanghai International Film Festival, where...

The 2013 St. Louis International Film Festival concluded Sunday night with a party at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Sliff announced the audience-choice and juried-competition awards.

Now in its 22nd year, the Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival is one of the largest international film festivals in the Midwest. This year’s festival was held Nov. 14-24, 2013.

2013 Sliff Film Awards

Best of Fest Audience Choice Awards

Best Documentary Feature: “Harlem Street Singer” directed by Simeon Hutner

Best International Narrative Feature: “Philomena” directed by Stephen Frears

Best Narrative Feature: “One Chance” directed by David Frankel

New Filmmakers Forum Award

“This Is Where We Live” directed by Marc Menchaca and Josh Barrett ($500 cash prize)

St. Louis Film Critics Association Joe Pollack Awards Best Documentary Feature: “Blood Brother” directed by Steve Hoover Special Jury Mention, Documentary Feature: “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step” directed by David Lewis

Best Narrative Feature: “Key...

The full Fantasia 2013 lineup has now been revealed, and we have here the third and final wave of titles to share. Prepare to drool!

From the Press Release:

The Fantasia International Film Festival is proud to announce the rest of our 120-feature lineup that comprises our 2013 event, along with a string of additional details that mark our 17th edition as a standout. Fantasia will engulf the city of Montreal from July 18-August 6, 2013. Be sure to visit the Fantasia Film Festival website for detailed essays on every title announced here, as well as all films previously disclosed over the last weeks.

Before we get started on titles... Meet Our 2013 Juries

Main Competition For The Cheval Noir Award For Best Film

Jury President: Laura Kern (Critic, Curator, managing editor, Film Comment)

Jean-Pierre Bergeron (Actor, Director, Screenwriter)

Samuel Jamier (Co-Director of the New York Asian Film Festival, Programmer at Japan Society)

Jarod Neece (Senior Programmer and Operations Manager,...

The Fantasia Film Festival is taking place from July 18th to August 6th in Montreal and will feature over 100 films from around the world. We gave you a look at the initial lineup last month and now have an additional list of Fantasia 2013 films that will be screening, including Curse of Chucky, You’re Next, and Frankenstein’s Army:

Horror Is Child’S Play – Don Mancini’S Curse Of Chucky (World Premiere)

A rarity among genre franchises, the Child’S Play series (begun in 1988) has retained the sure-handed guidance of original screenwriter/creator Don Mancini throughout killer doll Chucky’s decades’-long reign of horror. Mancini, who will be hosting our “scar-studded” world premiere, graduated to the director’s chair with 2004’s Seed Of Chucky, after having co-written or written every entry in the series. His longevity with the project is, of course, matched by the fiendish voiceover work by...

Southern California's largest AP fest, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, is coming right up and the fine folks at Visual Communications have just announced the full lineup. Things kick off May 2 at the DGA with Evan Jackson Leong's Sundance docu Linsanity. Centerpiece presentations include Tadashi Nakamura's Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings and Arvin Chen's latest romcom Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?. Japanese comedy Key of Life by Kenji Uchida will close things out on May 12. "The Laapff has become one of the main stops on the festival circuit for these major award winning festival films," states Abraham Ferrer, Laapff Senior Programmer. "We are honored to showcase these important voices from our filmmakers from around the world bringing their...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Film Movement has acquired North American rights to "Key of Life," a Japanese black comedy about identity theft as a desperate attempt at a new life. The film will open in New York in the summer of 2013 followed by a limited national run and a day-to-date VOD premiere. Kenji Uchida's cynical tale revolves around Sakurai, a miserable 35-year-old unemployed actor who just before taking his own life decides to steal the identity of a man with amnesia. Sakurai comes to discover that his new life is that of an elite assassin as he becomes entangled in a mess of illegal affairs with yakuza gang members. Meanwhile Kondo, the man with memory loss, becomes convinced he is Sakuri and struggles to succeed as an actor. "It has been quite a while since we have laughed so much with a film; 'Key of Life' kept a smile on our face throughout,...

Above: Ernie Gehr's Auto-Collider Xv.

The vast bulk of Tiff's 2012 has been announced and listed here, below. We'll be updating the lineup with the previous films announced, as well as updating links to specific films for more information on them in the coming days. Of particular note is that the Wavelengths and Visions programs have been combined to create what is undoubtedly the most interesting section of the festival. Stay tuned, too, for our own on the ground coverage of Tiff.

Galas

A Royal Affair (Nikolai Arcel, Demark/Sweden/Czech Republic/Germany)

Argo (Ben Affleck, USA)

The Company You Keep (Robert Redford, USA)

Dangerous Liaisons (Hur Jin-ho, China)

Emperor (Peter Webber, Japan/USA)

English Vinglish (Gauri Shinde, India)

Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (Shola Lynch)

Great Expectations (Mike Newell, UK)

Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell, UK)

Inescapable (Ruba Nadda, Canada)

Jayne Mansfield's Car (Billy Bob Thorton, USA/Russia)

Looper (Rian Johnson,...

The 37th Toronto International Film Festival® will roll out the red carpet for hundreds of guests from the four corners of the globe in September. Filmmakers expected to present their world premieres in Toronto include: Rian Johnson, Noah Baumbach, Deepa Mehta, Derek Cianfrance, Sion Sono, Joss Whedon, Neil Jordan, Lu Chuan, Shola Lynch, Barry Levinson, Yvan Attal, Ben Affleck, Marina Zenovich, Costa-Gavras, Laurent Cantet, Sally Potter, Dustin Hoffman, Francois Ozon, David O. Russell, David Ayer, Pelin Esmer, Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, Andrew Adamson, Michael McGowan, Bahman Ghobadi, Ziad Doueiri, Alex Gibney, Stephen Chbosky, Eran Riklis, Edward Burns, Bernard Émond, Zhang Yuan, Michael Winterbottom, Mike Newell, Miwa Nishikawa, Margarethe Von Trotta, David Siegel, Scott McGehee, Gauri Shinde, Goran Paskaljevic, Baltasar Kormákur, J.A. Bayona, Rob Zombie, Peaches and Paul Andrew Williams.

Actors expected to attend include: Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jackie Chan, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Bill Murray, Robert Redford,...

The globe-trotting section of this year’s Contemporary World Cinema programme has your Sundance (in a pair of excellent titles in Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere and James Ponsoldt’s Smashed) and has select items from several sections from this year’s Cannes ranging from Pablo Stoll Ward’s 3, Yousry Nasrallah’s After the Battle, Aida Begic’s Children of Sarajevo, Catherine Corsini’s Three Worlds, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, and they must see In The Fog a masterwork from Sergei Loznitsa and will be padded by world premiere items such as Annemarie Jacir’s When I Saw You, Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did and Sion Sono’s The Land of Hope (see pic above). Here’s the entire list of items that make up this year’s section:

3 Pablo Stoll Ward, Uruguay/Germany/Argentina North American Premiere For Rodolfo (Humberto de Vargas), life at home feels empty and cold,...

"Couples" (Jeong Yong-Ki, 2011) Based on the 2005 Japanese hit “A Stranger of Mine” (directed by Kenji Uchida), “Couples” is kind of like those Rube Goldberg sequences from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (or maybe the “how Cate Blanchett got injured” sequence from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), except for an entire feature-length running time. The results are both exhilarating and (at 110 minutes) exhausting. The main hub, where all the subplots and side-stories emanate from, concerns Yoo-Suk (Kim Joo-Hyuk), former photographer and current owner of a small café, who has sunk all of his money into a brand new condo for his wife to be Na-Ri (Lee Si-Young). While out on a date, Na-Ri mysteriously vanishes (that sounds far more menacing than it actually is). From here things spin out: Yoo-Suk hires a private detective to track her down and that private detective ends up getting involved with Na-Ri; Yoo-Suk ventures to the...

Iranian filmmaker Khosro Masoumi’s Bear won the Golden Goblet Award for Best Feature Film at the 15th Shanghai International Film Festival. This is Masoumi’s second Golden goblet after he won it in 2004 for Tradition of Lover Killing.

Canadian filmmaker Micheline Lanctot’s For the Love of God won the Jury Grand Prix. Chinese filmmaker Gao Qunshu was awarded Best Director for his thriller Beijing Blues.

Japanese filmmaker Kenji Uchida won the Best Screenplay prize for Key Of Life.

Indian film Color of Sky by Dr.Biju Damodaran also competed for the Golden Goblet Award.

2012 Golden Goblet Awards

Best Film: Bear; dir. Khosro Masoumi [Iran]

Jury Prize: For the Love of God; dir. Micheline Lanctôt [Canada]

Best Director: Gao Qunshu for Beijing Blues [China]

Best Actor: Vladas Bagdonas for The Conductor [Russia]

Best Actress: Ursula Pruneda for The Dream of Lu [Mexico]

Best Screenplay: Uchida Kenji for Key of Life [Japan]

Best Cinematography: Shi Luan...

A teaser for Kenji Uchida’s Kagi Dorobou no Method has popped up on YouTube and Yahoo! Japan.

The movie stars Masato Sakai as an out of work actor named Sakurai who’s planning to commit suicide as a way out of his failed life. Before he goes through with it, however, he stops off at a public bath where a rich man named Kondo (Teruyuki Kagawa) slips to on the floor and is stricken with amnesia.

Sakurai quickly decides to swipe Kondo’s locker key and switches identities with him. However, his newly-acquired life seems to bring him nothing but trouble and danger. Meanwhile, Kondo meets a young woman named Kanae (Ryoko Hirosue) at the hospital and begins happily settling in to Sakurai’s old life.

“Kagi Dorobou no Method” will be released by The Klock Worx in Japan on September 15, 2012.

Also known as: Key of Life (promotional title...

“Couples” is a Korean remake of Japanese director Kenji Uchida’s popular 2004 offbeat romantic comedy “A Stranger of Mine”, helmed by Jeong Yong Ki, who previously enjoyed success with commercial fare such as “The Righteous Thief” and “Once Upon A Time in Corea”. Like the original, the new version is by no means a straightforward genre outing, following a series of overlapping tales of various couples whose lives intersect thanks to bank robberies, car crashes and a variety of deceptions. Headlined by popular actor Kim Joo Hyuk (“In Love and the War”), the film is very much an ensemble piece, with support from a host of recognisable faces including Lee Si Young (“Meet the In-Laws”), Lee Yoon Ji (“Dream High”), Gong Hyung Jin (“Life is Beautiful”), and Oh Jung Se (“Petty Romance”). The film kicks off with café owner Yoo Suk (Kim Joo Hyuk) having a particularly bad day, experiencing financial difficulties,...

Whose Film Is It Anyway? Contemporary Japanese Auteurs, On tour

The Japanese movie scene moves faster than we can keep up with over here, so consider this a catch-up on names you might want to remember. Best known might be Yôji "Twilight Samurai" Yamada, whose family drama About Her Brother has been compared to Mike Leigh and Ozu, and Masayuki "Shall We Dance?" Suo, whose I Just Didn't Do It tackles a subway groping incident. As for the younger talents, Kenji Uchida weaves a Pulp Fictionesque web in A Stranger Of Mine; Miwa Nishikawa has scooped awards with her Dear Doctor, about a rural impostor, while Takatsugu Naitô's The Dark Harbour has been described as "a Wes Anderson social comedy set in a small Japanese fishing village." The programme tours seven cities, finishing in Nottingham on 28 Mar.

Ica, SW1, Fri to 16 Feb

Glasgow Film Festival

Think of it more as a season of festivals,...