Japan

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The story of a father and two teenaged sons, and the rivalry between the two siblings as they begin to discover the attraction of girls.

YOUTH OF THE SON (1952, aka MUSUKO NO SEISHUN) marked Masaki Kobayashi’s official directorial debut, telling the story of a father and two teenaged sons, and the rivalry between the two siblings as they begin to discover the attraction of girls. Although Kobayashi is credited as director, the movie was heavily influenced (and larger supervised) by Kobayashi’s longtime mentor Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-1998) and as such, it is more dominated by a sentimental tone common to Kinoshita’s films than displays of Kobayashi’s later, familiar lyrical visual style.
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PLOT SUMMARY
After escaping from an asylum, young medical student Hirosuke assumes the identity of a dead man in order to solve the mystery of a weird doppelganger whose picture he sees in the newspaper. Traveling to faraway Panorama Island, he discovers a mad scientist surgically remaking normal human beings into misshapen monsters…but that is only the beginning. Hirosuke soon learns the horrible truth about the island and his own family’s shameful past, and finds himself plunged into the depths of incest, murder, and madness.Read More »

The movie focuses on the plight of ten war orphans hailing from different cities across Japan. With nowhere to go, they scavenge around train stations, scratching out an existence by means of black market work for a one-legged tramp whilst avoiding being picked up by the police for vagrancy. Soon however, they find a more inspiring role model in the figure of a nameless soldier just repatriated after the war. An orphan himself, the soldier also has no home to return to, and so sets out across the country with the kids in tow in search of work before settling on the goal of leading them to the orphanage where he himself grew up.Read More »

This hard-to-find Fukasaku/Kurahara collaboration is an interesting coming-of-age story. The boy Shisuke grows up in a coal mining community in Kyushu, during and after the Second World War, and the viewer is treated to the
circumstances that shape the young man who emerges. Read More »

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A psychological thriller of a grieving mother turned cold-blooded avenger with a twisty master plan to pay back those who were responsible for her daughter’s death.Read More »

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Shunji Iwai’s Lily Chou-Chou offers eternal peace. She’s ethereal, the rebirth of death (indeed, she was born the moment Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon), and all-powerful, a voice for a pop-cyber culture that feeds on her Björkness. In All About Lily Chou-Chou, fans of the fictional singer use her “amniotic” music to detach themselves from the violence that consumes Japanese culture. Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is obsessed with Lily: He gets busted for shoplifting one of her CDs and engages in endless conversations on the website Liliphilia with fellow Lily-heads, “connecting” with the so-called ether that is Lily, just like he melds into colorful rice fields whenever he listens to Lily sing. While Yuichi is quiet and reserved, his online handle (“philia”) suggests a boy erupting with adult emotions, and though his friendship with “blue cat” is elusive it still feels within reach. Such is the dreaminess and possibility the film taps into.Read More »

Two reporters from competing newspapers and different moral setups investigate a drug ring, delving deeper into the underworld in the process.Read More »

壁の中の秘事
Three or four different stories of people living in the same apartment complex, adultery couple, student lost in voyeurism or just a lonely wife. Emotions and feelings generated by poor oppressive architecture, social study of post-war Japan, dramas of family life.Read More »

Summary from yesasia – “It has been three years since pop auteur Iwai Shunji’s last film Hana and Alice, and his latest offering may seem a bit surprising. In a marked departure from his previous youth-centric works, his new film is a documentary about legendary director Ichikawa Kon, whom Iwai cites as one of his greatest influences. In a momentous career spanning over fifty years, 91-year-old Ichikawa Kon has long established himself as one of the great masters of Japanese cinema. A lifetime his junior, 44-year-old Iwai Shunji has, through acclaimed films like Swallowtail Butterfly and All About Lily Chou-Chou, emerged with a distinct voice and language of his own amongst the current generation of filmmakers.Read More »