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Digital bookstore BookLive's Magademy Award , the Japanese manga industry's first award series to honor characters, returned for its third year to highlight the best of 2023 across six categories: Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and the newly added Best Picture, as decided by fan voting and a professional judging panel that also gave out a Jury Special Award. Nominees were decided via online fan voting that took place between October 5 to October 29, which resulted in a narrowed-down selection to be assessed by a panel of professional judges, with the winners being announced today. The nominees and winners (marked with **) for 2023 are as follows: Best Leading Actor Hiro Tanaka from My Home Afro Tanaka **Rintaro Tsumugi from The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity Akito Yamada from My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 Yukichi from The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today Yuru from Daemons...

Back in November, Fathom Events and Toho International teamed up to bring the 2002 Godzilla franchise entry Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla to U.S. theatres for the first time… and now they’re set to do the same thing for the 2003 Godzilla movie Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.! The film will be reaching 600 theatres across the United States on March 22nd.

Tickets are now available on FathomEvents.com, so check and see if Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. is going to be playing at a theatre near you. For this screening, the film will be presented with English subtitles. The one-day event will also include a special showing of Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex, a short that debuted at the 2022 Japan Godzilla Festival as a sequel to the short G vs. G (2019) – never before seen on the big screen!

Directed by Masaaki Tezuka, who wrote the screenplay with Masahiro Yokotani, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. has the following synopsis:...

Reviewed as part of the 27th Leeds International Film Festival (6-21 Nov, 2013)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Dir: Takanori Tsujimoto, 2013

Weary samurai Toramaru (Mitsuki Koga) has returned from his year-long pilgrimage, having travelled across Japan and fought against seven formidable foes. Now, kneeling before his sensei Gensai (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi), he relates the challenges through flashback, with each of his enemies representing a different martial art and, crucially, a telltale dish. Toramaru begins every account with a description of his preparatory meal, with Gensai excitedly trying to piece together the clues like a culinary Clouseau. Welcome to the Cosmic Way, where honour and enlightenment can be achieved through one sacred tenet: know your opponent through what he eats.

It may be a gimmick, but then the martial arts/cuisine comedy crossover is hardly a crowded field. Although the film’s low budget is plain to see, such financial restraints have doubtless forced...

Bushido Man

Written by Takanori Tsujimoto

Directed by Takanori Tsujimoto

Japan, 2013

Ingenuity can go a long way in filmmaking. It is one thing to have a large budget and get creative, it is an altogether different matter to be forced into creative thinking and film techniques because a team of creative minds have no serious budget to speak of. Perhaps it is in those instances that the fruit born out of the efforts of filmmakers shines brightest. When one has no money to spend freely, one must think a bit outside the box after all. Enter Bushido Man, which had its North Ameican premier at the 2013 Fantasia Film Festival, a movie displaying a feverish amount of exuberance.

It is after a long and arduous journey of personal discovery that Toramaru (Mitsuki Koga) returns to the Cosmic Way school of martial arts. His master (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) is especially pleased to see...

In conjunction with Bushido Man’s North American premier at the 2013 Fantasia Film Festival on July 27th, director Takanori Tsujimoto, action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura and star Mitsuki Koga sat down the morning after for an interview about the film itself, action movies and food.

Edgar Chaput: First I’d like to thank you very much for sitting down with us on this Sunday morning.

Translator Hidetaka Yoneyama: They could go to your home after!

EC: (chuckles). Thank you for yesterday’s screening, it was very entertaining. And, honestly, I was quite surprised at how good looking the movie was considering you kept saying it had no budget.

Takanori Tsujimoto: But you understand that it had no budget?

EC: Yes.

(Group laughs)

EC: Here in Canada and the U.S., many of the samurai and Bushido movies we watch are set in the past. Why was it decided to set...

Writer / director Takanori Tsujimoto's (who brought us such exploitation cinema delights as ‘Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle’ and ‘Monster Killer’) is back with Bushido Man a tale of intense martial arts combat, and good food!? Bushido Man will have its North American Premiere on Satuday, July 27th at 4:30pm, as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival 2013. And the good folks at Fantasia dropped us a link for the films international trailer. Suffice to say it bears all of Tsujimoto's hallmarks aka Low budget hard core action, and oddity, combined. Long may he continue. Synopsis: Toramaru (Mitsuki Koga), a student of "bushi," the martial way, is formidable fighter - and a formidable eater. He is on a quest to seek seven scrolls containing the fighting secrets of seven different disciplines: stick, knife, sword, kung fu, nunchaku, firearm, and special weapons. Along the way, he must learn his enemy's ways by what they eat,...

The full Fantasia 2013 lineup has now been revealed, and we have here the third and final wave of titles to share. Prepare to drool!

From the Press Release:

The Fantasia International Film Festival is proud to announce the rest of our 120-feature lineup that comprises our 2013 event, along with a string of additional details that mark our 17th edition as a standout. Fantasia will engulf the city of Montreal from July 18-August 6, 2013. Be sure to visit the Fantasia Film Festival website for detailed essays on every title announced here, as well as all films previously disclosed over the last weeks.

Before we get started on titles... Meet Our 2013 Juries

Main Competition For The Cheval Noir Award For Best Film

Jury President: Laura Kern (Critic, Curator, managing editor, Film Comment)

Jean-Pierre Bergeron (Actor, Director, Screenwriter)

Samuel Jamier (Co-Director of the New York Asian Film Festival, Programmer at Japan Society)

Jarod Neece (Senior Programmer and Operations Manager,...

The Fantasia Film Festival is taking place from July 18th to August 6th in Montreal and will feature over 100 films from around the world. We gave you a look at the initial lineup last month and now have an additional list of Fantasia 2013 films that will be screening, including Curse of Chucky, You’re Next, and Frankenstein’s Army:

Horror Is Child’S Play – Don Mancini’S Curse Of Chucky (World Premiere)

A rarity among genre franchises, the Child’S Play series (begun in 1988) has retained the sure-handed guidance of original screenwriter/creator Don Mancini throughout killer doll Chucky’s decades’-long reign of horror. Mancini, who will be hosting our “scar-studded” world premiere, graduated to the director’s chair with 2004’s Seed Of Chucky, after having co-written or written every entry in the series. His longevity with the project is, of course, matched by the fiendish voiceover work by...

Ninja Girl

Stars: Rina Takeda, Mitsuki Koga, Masanori Mimoto, Kotono | Written and Directed by Seiji Chiba

Ninja, just the name is cool right? So when you get a movie and it’s called Ninja Girl you can’t help but be intrigued. You expect kick ass fights and a girl kicking major ninja ass and when the director and writer Seiji Chiba is called a pioneer of the genre you have high hopes right?

Two ninjas have been given the task of kidnapping women to be used for the pleasures of the lower ranks of their ninja clan. The idea of course is keep the army happy they will fight a good war. The only problem the ninjas have of course is that one of the girls they manage to kidnap is actually a ninja seeking revenge for her mother who was also stolen to be trafficked in the same...

Writer-director Seiji Chiba sure loves ninjas, following his low budget epics “Rogue Ninja” and “Aliens vs. Ninja” with the imaginatively titled “Ninja Girl” (aka “The Kunoichi: Ninja Girl”). Certainly, it’s hard to fault the man for his dedication to the genre, and the film again sees him offering up his own skewed and slightly oddball take on the form, possibly taking another step along the road to producing the ultimate modern ninja opus. Working for once without his regular heroine Mika Hijii, Chiba teams with 19 year old real life karate sensation and the star of cult hits “Karate Girl” and “High-Kick Girl”, Rina Takeda, along with Kotono (“Mutant Girls Squad”), Mitsuki Koga (“Evil Ninja”) and Masanori Mimoto (“Aliens vs. Ninja”). The film is the latest of Chiba’s works to arrive on region 2 DVD, arriving in October via Mvm. As usual, the film is set back in 16th Century Japan,...

The official website for Kunoichi has been updated with a 90-second trailer. The film was directed by Seiji Chiba (Alien vs. Ninja) and stars karate idol turned martial arts actress Rina Takeda.

In the film, Takeda plays a young woman named Kisaragi who is abducted from her Koga ninja village along with three other women (Mayu Onomura, Shiho Fujisawa, and Kotono). The four of them are tied together with a rope and are led through the forest with sacks over their heads. Their captors are Shimotsuki (Mitsuki Koga) and Hizuki (Masanori Mimoto), ninjas from the rival Iga clan who sell the women they capture into prostitution. Suddenly, a mysterious man (Yuichi Sato) appears and releases the four women from their bindings, giving Kisaragi an opportunity to fight back.

Kunoichi will get a limited late show release at Theater N Shibuya from March 19-April 8.

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