Hisayasu Sato, known as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Pinku Eiga, has been known from being one of the most complex and versatile filmmakers to come out of pink films and one of the few to shoot both straight and gay films. This one, probably his best known work along with Splatter: Naked Blood, is a sophisticated, dark, brooding erotic film that’s also a big tribute to Pasolini.Read More »
Quote:
Nishimura has a passion for cooking, but never would he have imagined the task before him now: He is unexpectedly assigned to a south polar mission to serve as head chef at the Dome Fuji station. Leaving wife and daughter behind for a year, he and the other crew members experience one existential crisis after another in the icy cold. And then they run out of Ramen!Read More »
Quote:
The Locarno Film Festival is renowned for showing interesting, unconventional films, favoring fresh, undiscovered talent over established names. The two do occasionally mix: one example is Anthony Hopkins’ directorial debut Slipstream, a stream-of-consciousness satire that competed at the 2007 edition. It didn’t win anything, though: the prestigious Golden Leopard was picked up by Masahiro Kobayashi, who stunned critics and audiences with The Rebirth, a minimalistic character study of rare poignancy.Read More »
Quote:
When a chaste wife first learned about ecstasy …
I’m a woman in a high-class whore.
Colored with glittering sensuality, Yuki Mizuhara now falls into beautyRead More »
Quote:
Based on a 1956 television feature on Japan’s national network, NHK, this is one of Uchida’s rarest films. A socially conscious drama with a contemporary backdrop, Dotanba focuses on the attempts to rescue a group of trapped miners. The title is a figure of speech — (essentially “last minute” or “eleventh hour”) — that refers to a situation of peril. The film boasts a script co-written by Uchida and Akira Kurosawa’s frequent screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto, and stars Kurosawa’s frequent star Takashi Shimura.Read More »
Summary from the Film Society of Lincoln Center website:
Shooting on location in China, Tomotaka Tasaka presents a low-key but stirring account of the day-to-day travails and camaraderie of Japanese soldiers, swapping individual heroics for devotion to the group spirit. Tasaka’s typically clear-eyed treatment, which includes an extraordinary battle scene and an assault on a farmhouse, was so documentary-like in its feel for detail that when Americans later captured a print of the film, it was edited into a training reel for U.S. troops.Read More »
The unexpected death of Fujishima Motoharu, president of a medium-sized firm, triggers a fierce battle over his estate inheritance among family members.Read More »
Quote:
A woman’s struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government. Eiko and Omoi are jailed because of a fire at a factory instigated by Chiyo, a servant girl from Eiko’s home in Okayama, who was sold to slavery. A few years later the 1889 constitution is proclaimed, Eiko, Omoi, and Chiyo are pardoned, and the Liberal Party is reinaugurated. However Omoi does not campaign for women’s rights. – imdbRead More »
Quote:
Things go badly for a hack director and film crew shooting a low budget zombie movie in an abandoned Second World War Japanese facility, when they are attacked by real zombies.Read More »