Japan

A violent, guitar-playing, electrically charged boxer faces off against an electronic wizard half-merged with a metallic Buddha.Read More »

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Western audiences associate Japanese popular cinema with monster movies and period dramas such as samurai films but, as with most national cinemas, comedies and musicals were industry mainstays. Very popular with domestic audiences, they were generally considered not to travel well. Janken Musume (Janken Girls, also known as So Young, So Bright) is a good 1950s example.Read More »

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When his pistol is stolen, police detective Murakami is humiliated, especially when the gun is later implicated in a crime. Working with his superior, Chief Detective Sato, Murakami works feverishly to trace the location of his pistol, ultimately clashing with a gang of youthful Okinawans.Read More »

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A somber, visually distilled, and deeply affecting portrait of the human toll and uncalculated tragedy of nuclear holocaust. In contrast to Shohei Imamura’s characteristically unrefined, primitivistic, and subversively bawdy cinema, the film is shot in high contrast black and white, creating a spare and tonally muted chronicle of dignity, survival, community, and human resilience. Through recurring literal and figurative images of regression, Imamura conveys a dual meaning, not only in the community’s noble attempt to rebuild Hiroshima and return to a semblance of normal life after the annihilating bombing but also in their collective gradual and systematic erasure from Japanese society through long-term effects of radiation sickness, infertility, cultural (and geographic) isolation, and social stigmatization.Read More »

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Sawaki is released from prison after serving eight years for murdering a rival gang leader in order to obtain the land rights to a landfill for the Kotaki clan and he discovers that the world has changed significantly in that time. The police have forced the disbanding of all yakuza groups in and around Tokyo and most of the former yakuza have moved on to legitimate jobs while the low-level thugs have returned to their former gangs. Shimamura, a former executive of the Kotaki clan, has become the president of a construction company that built an oil complex on the landfill and now intends to build another one as soon as they clear the inhabitants off of land owned by Dr. Omachi. Shimamura takes control of the debt owed by Dr. Omachi on his poultry farm in order to exert pressure on him. The poultry farm is worked by Mie, Sawaki’s former lover and mother of his child. Sawaki feels connected to the residents and regrets past his actions that have caused their existence to now be threatened. When Shimamura and his rival former Kotaki clan executive Sakurada battle over the land rights and each pressure the residents in their own way, Sawaki views them as corrupt and decides to follow his traditional code of honor to save the residents.Read More »

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Toshio hires Yasaka in his workshop. This old acquaintance, who has just been released from prison, begins to meddle in Toshio’s family life.Read More »

Autotranslated from Japanesse:
Seven male students of the English literature department who have endured among 33 female students for four years of college life. After the graduation party, Nosaka visited Mieko’s house to deliver a bag of things left behind. Mieko broke up with Nosaka and she broke up with a bese without any promise. And the busy days passed by the members who went out to the society.Read More »

Starring Yellow Magic Orchestra and David Brooks Palmer, YMO Propaganda is a 1984 musical film directed by Shin Saito. The film originally premiered theatrically throughout Japan in 1984 and is considered by some to be the best visual work from ‘Y.M.O.’Read More »

PLOT: A police investigator cracks down on yakuza business, but once he realizes the police are in negotiations with certain factions, he sides with his own syndicate of choice.Read More »