The ne plus ultra of Japanese maverick Nobuhiko Obayashi’s work as a surrealist and staunch anti-war advocate, the cult “House” director’s dizzying and frequently dazzling final feature is told through the adventures of four young people who are magically transported into the movies themselves. Opening with a riotous bombardment of sound and image that risks confusing and losing some viewers even as it sends others into rapturous delight, “Labyrinth of Cinema” then makes sense of the chaos and emerges as
It’s something of a miracle that “Labyrinth of Cinema” exists. After being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2016, Obayashi completed “Hanagatami” (2017), the final chapter in his anti-war trilogy that included “Casting Blossoms to the Sky” (2012) and “Seven Weeks” (2014). Defying a prognosis that gave him just months to live, Obayashi then co-wrote, directed and co-edited this three-hour feature while undergoing treatment. He survived to see its world premiere...
It’s something of a miracle that “Labyrinth of Cinema” exists. After being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2016, Obayashi completed “Hanagatami” (2017), the final chapter in his anti-war trilogy that included “Casting Blossoms to the Sky” (2012) and “Seven Weeks” (2014). Defying a prognosis that gave him just months to live, Obayashi then co-wrote, directed and co-edited this three-hour feature while undergoing treatment. He survived to see its world premiere...
- 10/29/2021
- by Richard Kuipers
- Variety Film + TV
Labyrinth of Cinema Review: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Final Film is a Mammoth, Humbling Viewing Experience
There are so many critical and theoretical entry points for discussing a film so dense as Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema that it’s hard to know where to begin. One could easily spend countless hours and thousands of words mulling over all the literary and cinematic references, tonal jumps, and stylistic eccentricities. But one thing’s certain above all else: this mammoth final effort by Ôbayashi, an artist who so often destroyed the conventional boundaries of cinematic space in works like 1977’s Hausu, is a completely humbling viewing experience.
Displaying an unmatched breakneck momentum, Labyrinth careens through key moments in Japanese history and parallel genre universes with the inevitable directionality of a boomerang passing through multiple worm holes only to circle back again. Stylistically, Ôbayashi uses rear-projection and green screen to turn the classic iconography and archetypes of Japanese cinema into a plastic digital space where characters exist...
Displaying an unmatched breakneck momentum, Labyrinth careens through key moments in Japanese history and parallel genre universes with the inevitable directionality of a boomerang passing through multiple worm holes only to circle back again. Stylistically, Ôbayashi uses rear-projection and green screen to turn the classic iconography and archetypes of Japanese cinema into a plastic digital space where characters exist...
- 10/20/2021
- by Glenn Heath Jr.
- The Film Stage
Labyrinth Of Cinema, the final film by maverick filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi ; a love letter to the power of cinema will be playing on the big screen as it was intended.
The film will be released in New York at The Metrograph on October 20th, with a Los Angeles and regional release to follow in key theaters.
Labyrinth Of Cinema
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi (House)
Cast: Takuro Atsuki, Takahito Hosoyamada, Yoshihiko Hosoda, Rei Yoshida, Riko Narumi, Hirona Yamazaki, Takako Tokiwa
The final film by Nobuhiko Obayashi finds the late director returning to the subject of Japan’s history of warfare following the completion of his “War Trilogy,” which ended with Hanagatami. On the last night of its existence, a small movie theater in Onomichi—the seaside town of Obayashi’s youth where he shot nearly a dozen films—screens an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three...
The film will be released in New York at The Metrograph on October 20th, with a Los Angeles and regional release to follow in key theaters.
Labyrinth Of Cinema
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi (House)
Cast: Takuro Atsuki, Takahito Hosoyamada, Yoshihiko Hosoda, Rei Yoshida, Riko Narumi, Hirona Yamazaki, Takako Tokiwa
The final film by Nobuhiko Obayashi finds the late director returning to the subject of Japan’s history of warfare following the completion of his “War Trilogy,” which ended with Hanagatami. On the last night of its existence, a small movie theater in Onomichi—the seaside town of Obayashi’s youth where he shot nearly a dozen films—screens an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three...
- 9/12/2021
- by Rhythm Zaveri
- AsianMoviePulse
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s last work starts as a sentimental elegy to cinema-going’s golden age but takes us through the heart of Japanese darkness
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is the Japanese film-maker who directed the cult 1977 horror Hausu, or House, and in his long and prolific career also specialised in TV ads starring American movie actors for the domestic market (satirised in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation). Just before his death last year, at the age of 82, he completed this film, his valediction to cinema, to Japan and to life: an epic blitz of pop-culture hyperactivity: baffling, surreal, tragicomic, then simply tragic. At first, it looks as if it is going to be a sentimental lump-in-the-throat elegy to cinema-going’s golden age. But then it takes us to the heart of Japanese darkness: the second world war and the atomic bomb.
In the present day, a movie theatre in Onomichi, near Hiroshima,...
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is the Japanese film-maker who directed the cult 1977 horror Hausu, or House, and in his long and prolific career also specialised in TV ads starring American movie actors for the domestic market (satirised in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation). Just before his death last year, at the age of 82, he completed this film, his valediction to cinema, to Japan and to life: an epic blitz of pop-culture hyperactivity: baffling, surreal, tragicomic, then simply tragic. At first, it looks as if it is going to be a sentimental lump-in-the-throat elegy to cinema-going’s golden age. But then it takes us to the heart of Japanese darkness: the second world war and the atomic bomb.
In the present day, a movie theatre in Onomichi, near Hiroshima,...
- 4/26/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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