An emotionless hit man is sent on a mission to a remote town. There he stays with a caretaker / driver / servant / doctor who is given minimal instruction over the phone by “the organization.” A prostitute joins them. Death is inevitable, but whose?Read More »
Tsuyoshi Shindo came to the town of Tamari to prove the innocence of his friend, Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi was accused of attacking the president of Shimoyama Kensetsu, a local construction company, with a knife. Shindo knew Sakaguchi was not capable of committing such a crime. During his investigation, Shindo discovered the town and its police force to be under the control of Shimoyama. That made Shindo a marked man, with Shimoyama’s henchmen attacking in an effort to force him to end his investigation and leave town.Read More »
A film on the life of Bangorō Shibukawa, the founder of the Shibukawa-ryū school of jūjutsu. To paraphrase Tadao Satō’s blurb on the back cover of the video, this is an important film for three reasons.
1. It is an almost perfectly well preserved copy of one of only few full-length movies still available of the first superstar in Japanese cinema history, the very famous Onoe Matsunosuke.Read More »
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“The Go Masters” begins and ends with the same game of Go, but 32 years separate the opening and closing moves. In between, there is war and heartbreak, death and disease, doomed lovers, families separated by fate and united by chance. The movie is a melodrama on an epic scale, an Asian “Gone With the Wind,” filled with romance and action but built on a foundation of Eastern philosophy.Read More »
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Through his unconscionable actions against others, a sociopath samurai builds a trail of vendettas that follow him closely.Read More »
The story of the film is simple: A young girl in the countryside raises a young horse and develops a deep relationship to the animal. But the war is becoming part of life, so in the end she has to sacrifice her horse and sell it to the military.Read More »
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It was a milestone of film as activism, cinema as movement in Japan’s context. Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival. There, in collaboration with the Red Army members and PFLP, they produced this newsreel film depicting the everyday activities of Arab guerrillas as a cinematic narrative on the world revolution. Being a fusion of intense agitation and the ‘landscape theory’ approach inherited from “Aka. Serial Killer,” the film was conceived as a new form of news report, and was discussed in synchronicity with J-L Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group and the revolutionary films of Latin America, transcending geographical distances.Read More »
Makoto, a youth bound to the slums of Osaka, murders brutally and often, hoarding the entrails he collects atop his rooftop shelter.Read More »
In 1906, after finishing a tough migrant job in the Philippines, Takichi has returned to Japan. He starts to work as a rickshaw driver, but his lover had died of an illness, leaving a baby girl, Hatsue. Hatsue grows up beautifully and falls in love with Shintaro. But Takichi objects to their relationship…Read More »