Japan

The traditional nature of this kaidan, or Japanese ghost story, is underscored by the fact that it is based on a tale by Encho Sanyutei (1839-1900) — an author and performer of the late Edo-early Meiji period. His popular story “Botan Doro” has been the subject of some 18 film adaptations, this one being the first of the “modern” period. Sanyutei’s story was itself an adaptation of a traditional Chinese folktale that has a long history of re-telling and performance, especially in the form of kabuki theatre. It entered Japanese culture in the 1600s and became one of that country’s most loved kaidan, fusing romance, sexual politics and terror into an emotionally potent drama.Read More »

Nostalgia is Takashi Miike’s favorite film of his considerable body of work. Including biographical elements, Nostalgia centers around the home and school of a young boy, whose family mix the violent and dysfunctional with the comic and the loveable. Though containing elements of the sudden and shocking brutality that many associate with this director, Young Thugs – Nostalgia is more concerned with a child’s moment of leaving the internalized world of fantasy, and passing on eagerly to the next stage of life. A wonderful, touching, startling vision that is uniquely Miike’s.Read More »

A yakuza member’s half-sister means much more to him, in a film that repeatedly depicts realities other than what normal societal rules allow. The overly protective and loving brother; however, soon has to contend with his sister falling for and dating her school teacher, but there is not much he can do about it if he is going to land in jail for stepping outside the bounds of the law.Read More »

Shun Nakahara directs this comic take on Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic Twelve Angry Men. Just as in that earlier work, this film takes place in a jury room and takes place in real time. The film opens as the jury is about to acquit the defendant — a bar hostess who pushed her ex-husband path of an oncoming truck, supposedly in self-defense. Just as everyone seems to be in agreement over the woman’s innocence, one bespectacled juror (Kazuyuki Aijima) — no one is given names in this film — voices second thoughts. Slowly, like an inversion of Henry Fonda’s character in the earlier film, he sets about convincing his fellow jurors — a group of nice folks who don’t like thinking ill of people — that the defendant is in fact a cold-blooded killer. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Driven by lust and jealousy, two men and two women spiral into a frenzy of destructive madness. This shocking early work by Toshiki Sato, which depicts the fundamental and clear-cut themes of sex and murder with a rapid sense of speed and a momentum, tells a simple story of men and women whose jealousy and impulses spark a chain of murders and runs with a unique and strong tension.Read More »

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Takahisa Zeze first assisted on three productions tailored to gay audiences by the Pink studios Shishi Productions and ENK Productions before releasing his first own feature-length film in 1989. Even this debut made it clear that the director, who had been socialized with politically engaged protest cinema, was set to exploit the artistic scope of the production context in a special way: Into the erotic film frame, Zeze carries the tragic love story between a member of the Korean minority and a Taiwanese prostitute, and turns in a previously unprecedentedly offensive way to the exclusion experienced by impoverished Asian migrant milieus in Japan – a theme that was to preoccupy the filmmaker again and again throughout his career. The setting is a pile-dwelling settlement near Tokyo-Haneda Airport that belongs neither entirely to land nor to water, an allegorically charged no-man’s-land backdrop also found in numerous of Zeze’s films to come. –Christian LenzRead More »

From the Midnight Eye review by Tom Mes:

“Miyoko is as much a biopic of Shinichi Abe as it is an adaptation of his manga. Inevitably so, since the manga was, if the film is to believed, thoroughly autobiographical, describing the daily lives and romantic entanglements of Abe and his sensual wife Miyoko. Slaving away without much success at first, Abe hits the mother lode when he decides to make Miyoko not just the model for his heroines, but the heroine period. But after the first volume is published, complications ensue. The couple’s most private details are there in the pages of the magazine for all to see and follow.”Read More »

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32-year-old Ichiko (Sakura Ando) lives at home with her parents, passing the days in self-indulgent grunginess. Ichiko’s recently divorced younger sister Fumiko has moved back home with her young son. One day, after a particularly heated argument, Ichiko charges out of the house for good. With few employment options to support herself, Ichiko works the night shift at a 100 yen shop (dollar store). On her way home each day she passes a boxing gym where she watches Yuji Kano (Hirofumi Arai) silently practice, developing a crush on him. The pair starts seeing each other and things change for Ichiko… At last, the bell rings and longtime loser Ichiko’s rematch with life begins!Read More »

Synopsis
In Japan’s bubble economy everyone is looking for ways to increase their wealth and assets. But the Kimura family is particularly determined – in fact it is abnormally determined – to accumulate wealth. They don’t want a palatial mansion, they have no outstanding loans and they’re not planning to travel abroad. They just love money so much that they work day and night for even the smallest amounts. And of course nothing is allowed to go to waste.Read More »