Asian

This ATG film is a family drama set in 1953 in a small rural town in Tosa, Kochi. This was the first directorial effort by Takehiro Nakajima, a novelist whose work was adapted into Preparation for the Festival by Kazuo Kuroki.Read More »

Cinema-scope.com:
This film uses perfectly framed long takes, from a largely distant yet intimately engaged camera, to tell the story of a film crew driving around Tibet looking for actors to play in a filmed version of the opera. It wraps this quest around two concurrent love stories, and the whole becomes a masterpiece of understated emotional longing set against an urgent desire to preserve a disappearing culture.Read More »

Summary from Icarus Films:
A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family’s dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.Read More »

Quote:
This movie is probably as close to a chick flick as Raizo ever made! But there’s still good action and a very inventive sword fight at the end. Raizo fans cannot resist him any way. Info is sparse on this film, just recently translated into English, and once again, I rely on Paghat the Ratgirl for a review of this film:

Kiba-no-Masakichi, Masa for short, is a lumber worker who falls in love with Oshima (Tamao Nakamura) almost at first sight, in The One & Only Girl I Ever Loved (Nakayama shichiri, 1962).Read More »

Quote:
A young man, Kazuo, joins a new cult religion even though he sees through the initial recruitment pretense, and participating in the activities of a new social phenomenon, some of whose members genuinely believe in the principles and practice as preached, while others have more Machiavellian motives. (imdb)Read More »

Based on the novel by Osamu Dazai and distributed by ATG. The story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself “disqualified from being human” (a literal translation of the Japanese title) and goes down the stairs to self-destruction step by step.Read More »

During the fervently nationalist months leading up to World War II, a rebellious teenager is transferred to a new primary school in a small Inland Sea town. He vies with the school’s reigning bully, who takes a romantic interest in his older stepsister. When they learn she’s going to be sold to a brothel to pay off her father’s debts, they form an uneasy alliance to free her. With surprising moments of caricature and slapstick, Obayashi celebrates the anarchic world of adolescence while also satirizing adult hypocrisy and conformism.Read More »

Tokage was commissioned by television network NHK for a series in which the works of famous Japanese authors would be narrated on film, as captured by noteworthy directors. Tsukamoto was asked to direct the short story Lizard, by Banana Yoshimoto.

Lizard concerns a love affair between two healers who are unable to heal their own psychic wounds. The narrator is a counselor for disturbed children. He has fallen in love with a profoundly sad woman nicknamed Lizard who longs for oblivion. Lizard has an uncanny ability to diagnose and treat other people’s illnesses.Read More »

Obayashi’s take on the famous Kosuke Kindaichi series, made popular partly thanks to the numerous movie-adaptions by Kon Ichikawa, the most well known being The Inugami Family.Read More »