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Yuta Noguchi departs from his usual work in television to write and direct his bittersweet directorial debut, “Wandering Memories.” Implementing the knowledge taught by his filmmaking mentor Ken Ochiai, who also produces the project, Noguchi puts together a story heavily inspired by his personal emotional experiences. Those memories are a blueprint for constructing a fictional narrative that sticks close to reality.

Wandering Memories is screening at Skip City International D-Cinema Festival

A mother named Shiori desperately searches for her son Taka, who has been missing for a few years. Memories still linger as if he were still present. Her concerned father pleads for her to move on with her life and not be tied down by the past. However, she remains determined to do anything to reunite with her child. Eventually, Shiori contemplates a significant choice after meeting a peculiar yet empathetic pawnbroker.

“Wandering Memories” is sentimental, capturing the gut-wrenching...

Pop quiz: You’re a filmmaker. You’re making a zombie movie. The crew is … let’s be charitable and say “adequate.” The budget is somewhere in the high three-figure range at best. Your main actor is a pompous diva. Even worse, your lead actress isn’t giving you the amount of bone-chilling terror that you require. The climax involves her character killing the hungry corpse — also the man she loved — who’s now trying to eat her flesh. If she can’t sell the sense of sorrow and the scares,...

We’ve been fortunate to cover Fantasia multiple times over the years and it, along with Frightfest and Grimmfest, are staples of Nerdly’s genre festival coverage. What’s so great about Fantasia is the eclectic nature of the films they screen – new films, old films, international films, weird films, documentaries… Fantasia films run the gamut of genres, tastes and subject matter. And it’s now in its 25th(!) year of doing so!

With that in mind here are a few films that stood out to me from the announced schedule and, hopefully, a few we’ll get to bring you reviews of in the near future! You can also check out Alain’s preview of Fantasia right here.

Final Cut (Coupez!) After opening this year’s Cannes, Final Cut (Coupez!), Michel Hazanavicius’s riotous remake of Shinichirou Ueda’s One Cut Of The Dead, is coming to North America.

The last time the Cannes Film Festival dropped a zombie comedy into its coveted opening-night slot, it was 2019, and the movie ­— Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die” ­— was no big whoop, but it served its purpose. It got this most highfalutin’ of festivals rolling on an agreeable note of macabre cheekiness. Since that was only three years ago, you may wonder why the Cannes programmers decided to open this year’s festival — the hallowed 75th edition — with another rib-nudging absurdist zombie comedy. This one, too, is no big whoop. In fact, “Final Cut (Coupez!)” is barely even a little whoop, or any whoop at all. It’s kind of a slog. But it was directed by Michel Hazanavicius, who made “The Artist,” and it’s a remake of a Japanese zombie comedy, “One Cut of the Dead” (2017), that became a cult sensation. So on paper it looks like the...

There has been a flourishing of quarantine-produced short films lately, and a profusion of zoom-call ensembles of musicians, stunts, dancers and jugglers has invaded the social media, all free to be watched and enjoyed. Suppressed creativity pushing to burst out? A way to process this upsetting time? Nostalgia for a human connections? Boredom? All the above, probably. One sure thing is that the public has been gifted with lots of gems, where tech points are replaced with sympathy and smart planning. Few of these quarantine works are in our Amp Cinema for Free section.

One of the latest additions to this rich and imaginative lineup is Shinichiro Ueda’s “One Cut of the Dead Mission: Remote”. An introduction to Ueda and his 2018, low budget, incredibly successful and incredibly clever debut film “One Cut of the Dead” is almost unnecessary. Suffice to say that it made box office history by earning...

Stars: Mao, Shuhama Harumi, Takayuki Hamatsu , Yuzuki Akiyama, Kazuaki Nagaya, Hiroshi Ichihara, Manabu Hosoi, Syuntaro Yamazaki, Shinichiro Osawa, Yoshiko Takehara, Miki Yoshida, Sakina Asamori, Ayana Goda, Yuzuki Akiyama | Written and Directed by Shinichiro Ueda

One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a film crew are making a zombie film…Yet, this is no ordinary warehouse. It’s been said that it’s the site of where military experiments took place… Out of nowhere, real zombies arrive and terrorize the crew!

A low-budget zombie movie shot in one take, about a film crew shooting a low budget zombie movie in one take, sounds bad. Add the fact that the indie film crew stumbles across real-life zombies, and One Cut of the Dead sounds worse. But this isn’t just a zombie movie, or even a one-take stunt. Instead, it’s Japan’s smartest comedy of the year,...