Focus Features

Andy Warhol once said, “The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's,” but then Warhol had a penchant for saying the unexpected (and apparently really liked McDonald’s). Tokyo, of course, is one of the great metropolitan centers of the world, a vibrant, bustling capital city that is one of the three global financial strongholds, along with New York and London. Originally a humble fishing village known as “Edo” (meaning “estuary,” because it sits in Tokyo Bay), it grew into a military stronghold and the country’s de facto capital, changing its name to Tokyo (meaning “Eastern capital”) when it became Japan’s Imperial capital in 1868.

In addition to being a historic center and a bustling financial powerhouse, Tokyo is an extremely popular tourist city, with over 5 million visitors each year. Filmmakers also like to travel there, and not just for relaxation. In “Tokyo Movies: West Meets East,” Nick Dawson looks at the films made by European and American directors in Japan’s capital, from the 1949 Humphrey Bogart vehicle Tokyo Joe all the way through to 2008’s Tokyo!, a portmanteau triptych from Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho. And, of course, it was a city famously visited by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, released by Focus Features in 2003. In The Tokyo You Find in Movies, Peter Bowen looks at how fans of the movie can find the locations from Coppola’s film and others shot in the city.

In recent years, Tokyo has – like so many big cities – become awash with movie multiplexes, which have squeezed out the big one-screen cinemas from the old days. But that doesn’t mean that there are not still theaters with a little personality in Tokyo. If your tastes are a little low-rent, you’ll love Asakusa Meigaza, a scuzzy grindhouse in the Asakusa district of the city, which shows everything from 80s Hollywood fare to old samurai movies to vintage pornos. But if high-end moviegoing is your thing, you can live it up at the Shinjuku Piccadilly, where you can get a private screening room for 30,000 yen (about $320) a pop, or 30 million yen for a year-long rental. In A Cinephile’s Guide to Tokyo, Nick Vroman gives a first-hand account of the range of moviegoing experiences to be had in Tokyo, while cinematographer Sean Williams adds a flipside view in Tokyo Movie Theaters.

Until the 1980s, Tokyo had not yet embraced the idea of being a film festival town, but now it seems to be making up for lost time. The Tokyo International Film Festival was started in 1985 and is now one of the elite 10 global festival accredited by FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations), along with Cannes, Venice, Berlin et al. In 1991, the city reached out to LGBT filmgoing audiences by founding the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which is still going strong and entering its 19th year. Takeshi Kitano (aka “Beat” Takeshi), the actor-writer-director, applied his myriad talents to the film festival world in 2000 by creating Tokyo Filmex, an event run through Office Kitano, his production company.

In addition to Takeshi Kitano making movies out of Tokyo, the Japanese capital was also the base for arguably the country’s greatest ever filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, who spent the majority of his career working at Toho Studios, where he made his 1943 debut Sanshiro Sugata and also his last major film, Ran (1985). Toho was also the studio responsible for the great Japanese monster movies and introduced the world to Godzilla in 1954, the same year that Kurosawa made Seven Samurai. Tokyo’s latest prominent production house is the phenomenally successful Studio Ghibli, the animation company behind the films of Hayao Miyazaki, director of Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo.