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Blake Simons

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London, Tokyo
As seen in: Yahoo Entertainment, Financial Times, The Guardian, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo News Malaysia, Yahoo News UK, IGN, IGN Middle East, IGN Nordic, IGN Spain and
🎥 interview evangelist, freelance programmer, 2026 Daiwa Scholar ✍ romance, japan, animation, queer at @BFI @IndieWire @Variety @japantimes and more

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Blake Simons’s Biography

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Film journalist and programmer with a penchant for interviewing. Expert in contemporary Japanese cinema, romance on film, global queer cinemas, animation, Latin American cinemas, self-reflexivity, dialogues between videogames and film

2026 Daiwa Scholar. Co-director of London International Fantastic Film Festival

GALECA Member. Cineuropa GoCritic '24/'25, Far East Film Festival Campus '24. Founder of Queer Film Nights at King's College London

Blake Simons’s Journalist Portfolio

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John Waters on restoring Hairspray and Desperate Living: "The mistakes are part of the charm"

John Waters on restoring Hairspray and Desperate Living: "The mistakes are part of the charm"

His biggest popular success and one of his darkest comedies are arriving in the Criterion Collection at the s…

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Leave a Trace: Nagisa Isogai on 'Polar Night' and 'The Lust of Angels'

Leave a Trace: Nagisa Isogai on 'Polar Night' and 'The Lust of Angels'

An anthropologist of colliding emotions explores her distinct and defiant cinema

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'We Are Aliens' Director Kohei Kadowaki On Mixing Techniques

'We Are Aliens' Director Kohei Kadowaki On Mixing Techniques

Kohei Kadowaki discusses blending rotoscoping with traditional animation, crafting emotional realism, and the…

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'All the Lovers in the Night' film adaptation brings 'unstable beauty' to the screen

'All the Lovers in the Night' film adaptation brings 'unstable beauty' to the screen

During the Cannes Film Festival, director Yukiko Sode and actors Yukino Kishii and Tadanobu Asano reflected o…

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Elliot Tuttle, Kieron Moore, Reed Birney on 'Blue Film'

Elliot Tuttle, Kieron Moore, Reed Birney on 'Blue Film'

The team behind the year's most controversial queer film explores its nuance as they look back on their exper…

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Short, Sweet, and Steady: Shinnosuke Abe talks MIRRORLIAR FILMS

Short, Sweet, and Steady: Shinnosuke Abe talks MIRRORLIAR FILMS

The Shōgun star discusses MIRRORLIAR, the Japanese film industry's short film secret weapon

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Articles

“It’s never quite brutal enough for Chris”: The Odyssey cast reveal how they created Christopher Nolan’s epic adventure

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By Lou Thomas, matthew thrift, Blake Simons Verified
| BFI
A mammoth adventure epic that shot for 91 days across six months in six countries and cost a reported $250 million to make, The Odyssey is a cinematic beast worthy of its own mythology. Adapting and doing justice to one of the foundational texts of Western literature is a big gig. But if one director can take on a full-blooded adaptation of Homer’s epic 8th-century BC poem, it’s Christopher Nolan.
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“I use musical theory to shoot an action sequence”: an exclusive online interview with John Woo

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By matthew thrift, Blake Simons Verified, James Mottram Verified
| BFI
In August 1986, Hong Kong was running out of Ray Bans. Director John Woo and producer Tsui Hark had just unveiled their brooding action epic A Better Tomorrow, a tale of treachery and brotherhood among cops and crooks that would quickly become the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong cinema history, and rapturous fans were impatient to emulate the signature style of its leading man, Chow Yun-Fat.
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John Waters on restoring Hairspray and Desperate Living: “The mistakes are part of the charm”

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By Blake Simons Verified, James Mottram Verified, Nadia Denton
| BFI
When his films first shocked, charmed, and terrorised theatres in the 70s and 80s, John Waters was an unlikely candidate for mainstream canonisation. But here we are, with six of his feature films now released in lovingly restored Blu-ray editions from The Criterion Collection – joining this month are Hairspray (1988) and Desperate Living (1977).
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