James Balmont

As the Queer East film festival hits London this week, we pick out our highlights from the programme – from 90s Japanese cult classic Summer Vacation 1999, to ethereal Sichuan doc The Last Year of Darkness
The UK’s gayest celebration of East Asian cinema is back for a bumper fifth-year edition in 2024, and it’s never been more vibrant. Running from April 17 to 28, Queer East will take over iconic London venues like the BFI Southbank, the Barbican, and the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden with a...

Indie sleaze, rockstars and beer-soaked chaos: take a trip back to the legendary Vice-owned pub's 00s heyday
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There was a point in time, in the early ‘00s, when the Old Blue Last was quite literally the centre of London for kids like me.
The rowdy Shoreditch boozer — on the crossroads connecting Great Eastern Street with Curtain Road — was then a bastion of unhindered fun, lying almost exactly at the midpoint between the vintage clothes stores of Brick Lan...

Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada star in the new hit Hulu/FX/Disney+ series Shōgun, which brings to life Japan's violent feudal past in all its terrifying glory.
There's a stomach-churning moment in the debut episode of FX/Disney+'s Shōgun that sets the standard for the kind of brutality surely to follow. Having endured starvation, scurvy, and a captain's suicide aboard a ravaged Dutch trade ship, pilot major John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and his surviving crew are shipwrecked off the coast...

From the Game of Thrones showrunners, Netflix's new series 3 Body Problem is adapted from a bestselling Chinese sci-fi novel that became a huge hit, despite China's historic censorship of the genre.
One day in Beijing, in 1967, astrophysics student Ye Wenjie witnesses her father being beaten to death by paramilitary forces. Later, she joins a military program in Mongolia as part of an agreement to avoid her own punishment, on the condition that she can never leave the base. At this chilly out...

The Brian Jonestown Massacre once seemed destined to become footnotes in rock history. Sure, the West Coast psych-rock troupe were beloved by vinyl lovers and bowl-cut enthusiasts in the 1990s, but their attempts to break into the mainstream had been repeatedly thwarted – usually through self-sabotage by their frontman Anton Newcombe – leaving their stoner anthems languishing in obscurity by the dawn of the new millennium.
Then came Dig!. The cult documentary catapulted the band to notoriety ...

On DEATH RAVE, the Japanese group brings a fusion of black metal, techno and visual art as an ‘absolutely new and overwhelming experience’
In the 90s, avant-garde “Japanoise” band Boredoms were known for incendiary performances, achieving prominence in the States after touring with Sonic Youth and Nirvana. In 2006, Borisdelivered a sludge metal shoegaze “frenzy” on Pink, the ninth best album of the year according to Pitchfork. Bo Ningen has soundtracked everything from the 2011 Venice Biennal...

February 21, 2024

A key proponent of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, Wim Wenders has become a well-decorated man over a half-century of filmmaking. He’s won a Cannes Palme d’Or (Paris, Texas), a Cannes best director award (Wings of Desire) and a Venice Golden Lion (The State of Things), as well as receiving three separate nominations for dest documentary at the Academy Awards. But in 2024, the German icon is breaking new ground. For the first time ever, a Wenders narrative feature – his “...

Screening at the ICA and further afield from February, here are seven films to watch from the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024
January 31, 2024
TextJames Balmont
Kicking off on February 2 in London – and travelling through 30 cities including Manchester, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff until March 31 – is the 21st annual Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024; the biggest and brightest of its kind in the UK.
The latest programme of films, collated under the banner of ‘Unforge...

In the spring of 1993, anticipation for the biggest blockbuster in 65 million years was at a fever pitch. Michael Crichton’s best-selling techno-thriller Jurassic Park was still flying off shelves after two-and-a-half years in print, and teasers for Steven Spielberg’s megabucks movie adaption had both dino-crazies and normies foaming at the mouth. But just as the mega-hit was about to smash its way into cinemas, another industry icon was about to pull off an audacious stunt with a notorious B...

To mark the release of the 4K restoration of Nowhere, Araki speaks to Dazed about his choices for the film’s legendary soundtrack
Some filmmakers just have a great thing going on when it comes to musical partnerships. Steven Spielberg has John Williams; David Lynch had Angelo Badalamenti; and Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi are still going strong. But in the 90s, at the height of the indie cinema revolution, not every director needed a superstar musical wingman to make a vivid impression. In ...

While Squid Game, Parasite and BTS have dominated Korea's pop culture revolution, books and stories are now having their own moment, writes James Balmont.

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This year, as Netflix pledged a $2.5bn investment in Korean visual media in the same month that Blackpink's headline performance at Coachella marked a milestone in the festival's representation of Asian music, it would appear that South Korea's pop culture revolution is in full force. But just as the V&A's Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibiti...

In the 90s, Japan’s direct-to-video film industry – a world filled with sex, action, and cheap, titillating crime – was booming. Two decades on, we select the unlikely cult classics it left behind
As Japan’s economy boomed in the late 80s, its film industry faced a crisis. Box office sales were plummeting towards an all-time low of 122.9 million in 1996, with major studio Nikkatsu declaring bankruptcy by 1993. As home video devices became increasingly affordable, nationwide video rentals from...

Photo: AFP / Getty Images / Matt Winkelmeyer
Warning: This article contains some basic plot spoilers
One day in Beijing, in 1967, astrophysics student Ye Wenjie witnesses her father being beaten to death by paramilitary forces. Later, she joins a military program in Mongolia as part of an agreement to avoid her own punishment, on the condition that she can never leave the base. At this chilly outpost, beneath a giant parabolic antenna, she loses all faith in mankind. She commits her life to h...