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Almost four years after the film went into production, The Raid director Gareth Evans’ action thriller Havoc was finally released through the Netflix streaming service back in April, where it had a strong debut and even earned praise from Quentin Tarantino. Evans recently let us know that he has a new idea for the long-awaited The Raid 3 – but it doesn’t look like that’s going to be his next project. According to industry scooper Jeff Sneider of The InSneider, Evans is now set to direct a remake of the 1967 Japanese film A Colt Is My Passport – and if you’ve been paying attention to Evans’ social media in recent years, it might not be too surprising to hear that he’s interested in making a new version of that movie.

Evans has been open about the fact that he first became aware of the existence of A Colt Is My Passport...

In 2010, during the 10th edition of the Udine Far East Film Festival, Mark Schilling curated a retrospective of films produced at the Shintoho Studio under the leadership of Mitsugu Okura, who served as president from 1955 to 1961. To accompany the retrospective, “Nudes! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho” a book written by Schilling was also published, offering an in-depth analysis of the history of the company, including biographies and interviews of some of its key individuals.

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In that fashion, the book begins with a chapter focusing on the history of the studio, from the its early days in 1947, when it was home to filmmakers like Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse and Ichikawa, to Okura’s reign in the 50s and 60s, who turned the company towards genre filmmaking with the titular terms being key in the style of its titles, along with the ama films,...

Yesterday it was announced that manga artist Tatsuya Egawa (Golden Boy, Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari) has completed work on his second live-action film as a director and that it will be released this summer. Unlike his last film, 2006’s “Tokyo University Story”, this is not based on one of his manga, but an entirely original story.

Takuya Ishida (The Chasing World) and Sei Ashina (Nanase Futatabi: The Movie) star as two of 10 people gathered together in a room to play a mysterious game. In fact, they’ve each been brought there under a secret contract, and are not allowed to reveal any details about their true identities to each other. The film is said to highlight dark aspects of the human psyche, illustrating people’s potential for lust and violence when trapped somewhere and controlled.

Other cast members include Shunsuke Kubozuka, Ai Maeda, Keisuke Horibe, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Nana Natsume, Jai West,...

Takashi Nomura’s 1967 film A Colt is My Passport is arguably the best known of the five films featured in the Nikkatsu Noir box set from Eclipse. For that reason, and the fact that it is the most recent of the five films including in the set, A Colt is My Passport a good place to start when examining Nikkatsu Noir.

In A Colt is My Passport , chipmunk-cheeked action star Jo Shishido plays Kamimura, a hitman hired by a mob boss to exterminate the head of an opposing group. Kamimura, who runs around with a sidekick named Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio), does the job perfectly. In fact, he does the job too perfectly, forcing his employers to send him into hiding. While in Kamimura is in exile, the rival mobsteam up, leaving Kikimura and his buddy in a bad situation. During their effort to get out of Japan, they are aided...