By Claudia Siefen

Mes’s sort of narrative history of Miike’s filmography gestures at its philosophical dimensions, and is also interested in coupling the director’s biography with the wider aesthetic and japanese society contexts of that decades, too. His book is gripping, as he is dipping from time to time in self-forgotten sentences but never pedantic or even worst: embarrassing. The book’s expansive, full-coloured pages (a ballanced range of unique set photos and film stills by long-time Miike collaborator Christian Storms) and generous margins render that volume a world unto itself, while emphasising the issues Mes addresses in his tale.

by John A. Riley

A body found in a ditch in a remote rural area. Violent cops with no qualms about roughing up suspects. Rivalry between the rural cops and the big city detective who’s assigned to the case as it becomes clear there’s a serial killer on the loose. The well-worn tropes of the detective and police procedural genres are, in Memories of Murder, reinvigorated and fashioned into something sly and critical that retains a hard-hitting power.

By Sarah Nichols

In looking for a way to write about David Lynch’s Lost Highway, I found myself going back to the 1955 essay “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. They were, of course, looking at those films from what we think of as the classical period of noir, and realizing that “one could simplify the problem by assigning to film noir qualities such as nightmarish, weird, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” (1).

By John A. Riley

Adam Curtis and Patrick Keiller are two makers of idiosyncratic documentaries who have carved out unique careers over the past few decades, stretching the documentary form to breaking point in the process. In this article, I’ll argue that haunting is one particular theme that not only unites the two filmmakers, but goes a long way to explaining their respective warpings of the documentary form. What emerges from their use of the haunting motif is a critique of the prevailing political status quo in Britain

By John A. Riley

In The Pursuit of Happiness, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell outlines a blueprint for the comedy of remarriage. In Audition, genre-bending director Takashi Miike unveils his tragedy of remarriage, a radical inversion in which Aoyama, a middle-aged film producer is persuaded to remarry. His desire to find a wife is staged, with the help of another film industry professional, as an audition for a part in a nonexistent film. The film will never materialise but Aoyama’s new bride will. But where Cavell found fables of change and growth in his remarriage movies, Miike fashions his visceral tragedy from myopia, vanity, wealth and status, insecurity, and a long legacy of abuse.