meta: Thriller

This labyrinthine noir about a third shift cabbie grows in unexpected directions, becoming one of the best anime offerings in a long time

Lopsided, but still very enjoyable; if this hasn't raised the upper bound for anime-to-live-action, it sure has raised the lower bound

Your standard cop-buddy story, made only slightly more interesting by having the buddy being a magic-wielding paladin

A deeply unappreciated David Lynch-esque jolter, from two major writers of anime live-action adaptations; a horror-feminist project that deserves reexamination with fresh eyes

An attempt to both modernize and partly Westernize Edogawa Rampo's thriller falls flat on both counts

Kouhei Kadono's knotty novels walk us backwards through the tangled stories surrounding a being that arises just long enough to right the world when it has fallen out of joint

Shinya Tsukamoto's grimy underworld odyssey about a man obsessed with the weapon that killed his girlfriend is more potential than payoff

Two short films from Shinya Tsukamoto, now anthologized in the Arrow box set for the director, show off his cheeky-humored and bending-sinister sides

The first of screenwriter Hisashi Nozawa's novels to find its way into English spellbinds, at least until its cop-out climax

Two decades on, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's mutant serial-killer thriller remains among his very best films, and one of Japan's finest from the 1990s generally

Jee-woon Kim's live-action adaptation of Mamoru Oshii's 'Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade' is passable on its own, but doesn't come close to the primal shadow-play sorcery of the original

Natsuo Kirino's nervy thriller pits four working-class women against Japanese society -- not just its seedy underbelly, but its whole stacked deck of capital, class, and sex

These cyberpunk/SF mysteries drawn from the works of Ango Sakaguchi are intriguing for how they adapt a classic author, but grow far too gimmicky for their own good

Almost forty years later, this jet-black comedy about a one-man nuclear terrorist ring remains an absurdist masterwork

The one great idea to be found in Kenji Kamiyama's new film is stranded in a mishmash of a story that tries to do too many things and accomplishes almost none of them

More than forty years later, Toshio Matsumoto's psychedelic whirlpool of counterculture sexuality and continuity-shattering New Wave filmmaking remains a one-of-a-kind blast of cinematic fresh air

'Beat' Takeshi Kitano's first outing as director remains among his best movies -- and also among his most nihilistic and unforgiving

A clever and inventive retelling of three classic Japanese samurai-era tales, channeled through detective-noir sensibilities

This isn't 'Death Note'; it's barely Cliffs Notes

Few anime intended for mainstream consumption are this avowedly experimental; fewer still pull it off to the degree this one does