Japan

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself “already dead.”Read More »

Edogawa Rampo is a writer whose latest work is censored by the government, deemed too disturbing and injurious to the public to be allowed to be published. However, after burning his drafts, his publisher shows him a newspaper with an account of events just like his forbidden story. As the film progresses, fantasy and reality intermingle in a tale that draws heavily on influences from Poe and Stoker’s Dracula. The film’s strongly Expressionistic direction skillfully combines a variety of media (animation, computer-generated imagery, grainy black-and-white fast film stock, color negatives) for artistic effect.Read More »

The film depicts a man and a girl with the sensibility and body of a wolf who threaten a city of people who live like sheep under control.Read More »

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Few novels were filmed as many times as Shiro Ozaki’s famous Theatre of Life . So rich and appealing is this roman fleuve about chivalrous yakuza that, over the decades, it was rendered in “youth”and animated versions, as a lavish epic or omnibus film (including one by Kinji Fukasaku), and indeed was initially made by Uchida in 1936 as a highly regarded “social tendency” film. But Uchida’s later version is considered the gold standard, partly because of his mastery at visual storytelling, partly because of his superb ensemble cast. The yakuza Hishakaku kills someone in a dispute over a barmaid, but turns himself in at the urging of Kiratsune, an old gangster who has just returned from eight years in Shanghai and has become his protector.When he gets out of prison, Hishakaku finds himself once again torn between his sense of duty to his gang and his sense of humanity, and is drawn back into the bloody clan feuds.Read More »

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While it has been reported on several anime news sites that the newest Takashi Miike film is based on the Hashida Yukari “boy’s love” manga, WARU, the live action film is actually based on a popular 70s manga of the same title. Japanese sources clearly credit Hisao Maki’s dramatic action manga, WARU — an edgy action-packed tale of outlaw swordsman Youji Himuro — as the story on which the film is based.Read More »

While Mishima has just committed suicide in public, two couples accidentally meet in an inn in the countryside: the man and the woman, now with different companions, had known each other years ago…Read More »

A focus on one of the grandmasters of classic Japanese cinema, world-renowned filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro.Read More »

Synopsis:Cult Japanese director Gakuryu Ishii (formerly known as Sogo Ishii, a longstanding influence on Quentin Tarantino) presents a world coming to an end. On a university campus the students separately rehearse a performance, discuss an urban myth and debate the future of an unborn child, but all are inconvenienced by their sudden unexplained deaths. Adapting the screenplay from his own play, writer Shiro Maeda’s dialogue is shot through with absurdist observations and deftly mixes dread with farcical comedy.Read More »

A woman slowly coming to the realization that a relationship with her ex-boyfriend may well and truly be dead and she faces the decision of whether to resurrect it or move on.Read More »