Midnight Eye
Japanese film review website
Midnight Eye is a non-profit review website launched in 2001 by Tom Mes, Jasper Sharp, and Martin Mes. The website features reviews and analyses of Japanese films, as well as book reviews and interviews with filmmakers. In June 2015, it was announced that no further content would be added to the website.
History
Editor Tom Mes, alongside his brother, designer and programmer Martin Mes, and fellow editor Jasper Sharp, launched the website in spring 2001. Tom Mes conceived the idea for the website after watching a retrospective of then-recent Japanese films at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000.
In 2004, Tom Mes and Sharp published The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film, a book about Japanese cinema which includes over 100 reviews of Japanese films, and which features a foreword by Hideo Nakata. Throughout its history, the website has published articles by numerous contributors, along with interviews with filmmakers such as Takashi Miike, Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, and Yuki Tanada, among others.
On 29 June 2015, Sharp and the Mes brothers announced that the website was retiring, and that no further content would be added to it. In their announcement, they wrote "The site will remain as and where it is for the time being, but after fifteen years of creating the main source of info on Japanese cinema in the English language we are calling it a day."
Reception
Midnight Eye has been referenced by such publications and companies as Bustle, the Criterion Collection, DVD Talk, Forbes, and Vice.
References
Further reading
Mes, Tom; Sharp, Jasper (2004).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Midnight Eye” as japanese film review website. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as japanese film review website. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85785359. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2015, 2000 and 2004.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Midnight Eye” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.