Asian

A lancer falls into disgrace when his social ambitions lead him to become engaged to two different women.

Quote:
LEAD: Don’t be put off by the title. ”Gonza the Spearman” is not an Eastern western. Masahiro Shinoda’s stately work, which opens the Public Theater’s Autumn in Japan series today, has few duels and only a gout or two of blood. Instead, it is filled with historical imagination, social comment and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty.Read More »

MARK SCHILLING wrote:
Junji Sakamoto’s “Zatoichi: The Last,” the latest revival, doesn’t feature Katsu, who died in 1997 after a wild, riotous life. Instead it stars the hyper SMAP singer Shingo Katori, who has mostly appeared on the big screen in comedies (“The Uchoten Hotel”) or kiddie actioners (“Saiyuki”).

Also, instead of portraying Ichi as an outcast and loner, the film gives him a wife, friends, a community — and strong feelings for all of them.Read More »

Chokon depicts the tragic lives of two brothers in the late Edo period; the title is a word borrowed from the Chinese, meaning “the grudge that one cannot forget.”

Only the last reel of this feature survives, but even a fragment vividly demonstrates Daisuke Ito’s visual style.Read More »

21-year-old Eriko breaks up with her boy friend after their date at the circuit. But life without a boy friend is indeed dull. Boredom occupies her even after she completely switches her job. Then she meets Tamura at a party. Eriko takes a liking to Tamura. A few days later, when Eriko asks him out on date, Tamura happily accepts. However, during their date Tamura abruptly announces that he had a girlfriend studying in the U.S. Tamura’s innocent look enhances Eriko’s shock, as she returns home completely dumb struck. After this incident Eriko tries to give up on Tamura, but fate plays with her. A few days later, Eriko bumps into Tamura at a mini theater in. In seeing Tamura innocently laughing at the play, Eriko realizes her true feelings for him. Read More »

Though Suzuki created it in the midst of his stylistic breakthrough, «Our Blood Will Not Forgive» has never received the same amount of attention as other films he made around the same time. Nikkatsu icons Hideki Takahashi and Akira Kobayashi star as brothers — one a gangster, the other an ad man — who unite to avenge their yakuza father’s death eighteen years before. The film features a bold use of colour; an absurdist concluding gunfight; and, in one memorable scene, an impressively illogical use of rear projection as the brothers argue in a car while ocean waves rage around them.Read More »

The struggles of a group of immigrant outcasts living in an alternative-future, xenophobic Japanese metropolis.

After a young girl’s mother dies, she is cared for by Glico, a brassy hooker, who gives the girl the name “Ageha” (Butterfly). Ageha goes to work for a collection of oddballs who run a junkyard and salvage business.Read More »

Synopsis
An elderly college professor wants to bring the joys of sex to his wife. He bribes his son in law to shag ger because it makes him jealous and he can perform better. He keeps a journal of his fantasies in a locked cupboard, hence the title, and hopes that his wife will find the key and read it.Read More »

Daw Ming Lee, The Historical Dictionary of Taiwan Cinema:
King Hu’s next film was a portmanteau film,The Wheel of Life/Da lunhui (1983), in which he once again codirected with Lee Hsing and Pai Chingjui, as he did in Four Moods. The Wheel of Life revolves around romance between two men and a woman that repeats itself in several generations. Hu was responsible for the story of the first generation, set in the Ming dynasty that he was most familiar with. It is an intriguing romantic story involving a secret service agent, the daughter of the governor, and the leader of the antigovernment army who is plotting vengeance. Hu directed the episode well. This film, too, failed at the box office.Read More »

In the pastoral expanse of rural Bengal, in Purulia district, single railroad workers and best friends Balaram (Shankar Chakraborty) and Nemai (Tapas Pal) spend their days wrestling on a hill with little work to speak of because the fact that their flag station has only a couple of trains to be flagged off or signalled to.Read More »