Asian

A man looking to transplant cherry blossoms along the countryside encounters a blind woman who accompanies him for the journey.Read More »

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s sci-fi fantasy (from a manga by Kazuo Umezu) about a middle school that gets transported by an earthquake to a strange and otherworldly landscape.Read More »

Here’s Jissoji Akio’s impressive theatrical debut. Distributed by ATG and with a script by Oshima Nagisa, it’s a fascinating dissection of 1960s Japanese youth angst. Oshima wrote the screenplay for television in 1964, but due to the subversiveness of the story it never got made there. Which doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that the film consists of four students in a room, who decide to leave the gas on and bet money on who will stay there the longest…Read More »

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In a remote mountain village, the teacher must leave for a month, and the mayor can find only a 13-year old girl, Wei Minzhi, to substitute. The teacher leaves one stick of chalk for each day and promises her an extra 10 yuan if there’s not one less student when he returns. Within days, poverty forces the class troublemaker, Zhang Huike, to leave for the city to work. Minzhi, possessed of a stubborn streak, determines to bring him back. She enlists the 26 remaining pupils in earning money for her trip. She hitches to Jiangjiakou City and begins her search. The boy, meanwhile, is there, lost and begging for food. Minzhi’s stubbornness may be Huike and the village school’s salvation.Read More »

Midnight Eye review:
Serpent’s Path and its companion piece Eyes of the Spider (Kumo No Hitomi) both start from the same premise: a man taking revenge for the murder of a child. Kurosawa used this premise as the jumping-off point for the two films rather than their definition, resulting in a pair of works which are not so much occupied with revenge, but with the mental processes of human beings in situations that have placed them outside everyday life.Read More »

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Pu, a young girl, has been dreaming that her mother, who had died some years before, is building a house. A fortune teller advises her that, should she continue to have this dream, her father will die when the house is completed. Her father, a playboy, is a karaoke regular. He eventually becomes involved with Yok who has connections with the Chinese Mafia. Noi, son of an American soldier who dreams of saving money, is learning English and wants to leave for America. He is in love with Pu, but too shy to reveal his love for her. Pu cannot stop dreaming about the house. Her father’s relationship with Yok brings him nothing but bad luck… ..Read More »

Tuna fishing. It doesn’t exactly evoke the stuff of drama, yet very dramatic is this gripping yarn (puns intended) about the solemn, solitary lives of the men who catch what ends up as our sushi and sashimi. Opening with a shot of a young couple traversing sand dunes, the woman posits a question – women or fishing? This question fuels the drama of the next two-plus hours. – See more at: linkRead More »

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A young girl in a sailor moon outfit, sits quietly in an empty room, looking at a photo album of girls (from earlier films in this series) who have commit harakiri. The viewing and thought of the suicide turns her on, much in the way that extreme desire and input draw us closer to feeling we have found something tangible. She believes she has found it, so much that she must feel closer to the experience, and the only way to do so is to commit harakiri herself.Read More »

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Kihachi Okamoto directs his 37th film with this sweet-natured satire about bungling cops and tax scams. The story opens with an 84-year-old widow and grandmother (Tanie Kitabayashi), who lives in a palatial estate in rural Wakayama prefecture, getting jumped by a trio of bumbling thugs (Toru Kazama, Katsuyoshi Uchida, and Hiroshi Nishikawa) and shoved into their waiting car. Instead of being afraid for her life, she is — to the chagrin of her would-be captors — having the time of her life. Soon the strong-willed granny takes command of her own kidnapping, offering the house of her former maid as a hideout and suggesting the amount of the ransom — ten million yen.Read More »