"A riveting art film that chronicles the dramatic life and death of the great twentieth-century Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, and also brings to life three of his fictional works. The real-life story is as dark and surprising as any of the novels. Philip Glass’s original score works perfectly with the striking imagery."

"One of my favorites. It’s my two-year-old daughter’s favorite movie. She’s the green gargantua and my other son is the brown one, and she loves being the bad green gargantua. She’s obsessed with it, as I was. I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies and I particularly, unlike most hard core film people, like dubbed movies — there’s something about that language and the translation that somehow fits into the movie; it’s like a weird poetry. There’s a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs — there’s a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters. I don’t know if it’s because the actors were so bad, but the monsters were always the emotional focal point"

"Let’s go with Seven Samurai. I’m a huge Akira Kurosawa fan. You can tell that Parabellum is the closest thing to a western chanbara film—which is a Japanese slang term for a samurai/sword-fighting movie. John Wick is basically paying tribute to all the great samurai and spaghetti westerns out there. That’s where we get it."

"Searle has inspired and influenced me since I was six years old. He was one of the greatest illustrators and cartoonists of the 20th Century. A Japanese prisoner-of-war in his early 20s, he managed, often with great difficulty, to make drawings and, remarkably, to keep them. Horrifying, often moving, sometimes funny, this collection is a total joy, on so many levels. "