1991-2000

Kinema Jumpo “Best movie”-winner of 2000.

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Veteran director Shinji Somai lensed this heart-warming family drama about a shabby looking coot claiming to be the father of an elite salaryman. Hiroshi Nirasaki (Koichi Sato) is a securities broker desperately trying to keep the fact that his company is about to go belly-up from his high-strung upper-class wife (Yuki Saito). One day, while walking home from a particularly bad day at work, he gets accosted by an old bum (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who demands to be taken in by his son. Though his mother told him that his dad died when he was born, the drunken geezer knows enough about him and his short order cook mother (Sumiko Fuji) that he is almost convinced. Read More »

The protagonist finds out that some children were left behind in a sinking school, and is slowly driven mad as he tries to save them. A parable on the theme of the Last Judgment, numerous catastrophic events reveal a certain ambiguity in their origins, accompanied by the terrible suspicion that the things going on are some kind of a performance or theatrical production.Read More »

A woman places an ad in the “Soldier of Fortune” magazine to hire a contract killer.Read More »

Despite her husband’s doubts, a woman reaches out to her dead daughter with a psychiatrist’s help.Read More »

Zero Patience is a 1993 Canadian musical film written and directed by John Greyson. The film examines and refutes the urban legend of the alleged introduction of HIV to North America by a single individual, Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, better known as Patient Zero, was tagged in the popular imagination with the blame in large measure because of Randy Shilts’s history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. The film tells its story against the backdrop of a romance between a time-displaced Sir Richard Francis Burton and the ghost of “Zero” (the character is not identified by Dugas’ name).Read More »

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This sweet-natured if somewhat bizarre examination of teenage angst, Israeli-style, proves yet again what a dearth of original ideas seems to plague American cinema; watching this freewheeling, occasionally surreal, study of a young girl with Cassandra-like prophetic powers, is an example of wholly original filmmaking, for better or worse. If it is occasionally uneven in tone, it is just as bracingly refreshing in that you’ve probably never seen anything quite like it before.Read More »

Revolutions, natural disasters, toxic fall-out, plane crashes – these are all part of the running picture of news against which America’s leading novelist, Don DeLillo , sets his fiction. In this film, as in his novels, DeLillo pinpoints the deep unease beneath the surface of our lives. The film begins with the assassination of President Kennedy and the politics of violence it brought to television screens for the first time. It goes on to look at the way the media has continued to feed its audience images of disaster and terror: massacres in great public squares, disasters in football stadiums, and dramatic acts of terrorism. DeLillo explores the relationship between words and images, and between gunmen and the novelist.Read More »

Three young men prepare to take their university entrance exams while each dealing with real world problems that can effect every day people in Seoul.Read More »

From Steven Holden in The New York Times:
“Praying With Anger” is a standard male rites-of-passage film with one fascinating difference: Dev Raman (M. Night Shyamalan), a hotheaded exchange student who endures assorted trials on his way to responsible manhood, is an American-born Indian who goes all the way to Madras to grow up.

The film, which opens today at the Village East, is the cinematic debut of Mr. Shyamalan, a 22-year-old director, who wrote and produced the movie in which he also plays the leading role. Sumptuously photographed on location in Madras, it offers a vision of contemporary life strikingly different from that shown in most films set in modern India, which tend to dwell on the mystical and the exotic.Read More »