Japan

This is one of Gosha Hideo’s last great movies before entering into his “Women’s Films” stage. Set in the frigid wilderness of Hokkaido during the early days of the Meiji era, this film stands out for its mixture of brutality, sexuality, romance, and bloody violence. Nakadai Tatsuya stars as the brutal warden of Kabato Prison, where the convicts were sentenced to forced labor to build the roads needed to open up the territory. All the elements of his greatest films are here, from vicious catfights to brilliant sword action and a plot that’s filled with twists and turns like no other.Read More »

Longtime Koreeda cinematographer (Nobody Knows, After Life) Yutaka Yamazaki’s first directorial effort, Torso, plows some similar ground to Koreeda’s Air Doll, but to much different effect. Torso covers the relationship between two half-sisters. The older one, Hiroko (Makiko Watanabe) is an uptight, disengaged urban survivor, whose only relationship is with an inflatable male torso. Her secret life of bathing, frolicking and having sex with this headless, armless and legless prosthetic is rudely interrupted when her half-sister, Mina (Sakura Ando) – all extroverted enthusiasm and blabber – appears at her doorstep running from her abusive boyfriend, the one person, or rather body, that never physically appears in the film. The torso and continuing variations of objectified bodies – perfume bottles, pillows, a dress-making mannequin and a gravure idol – becomes the underlying leitmotif of this sensitively rendered portrait of how individuals come to terms with their issues and problems. The “strange” sexuality of blow-up doll attraction is rendered somewhat positively. Watanabe and Ando are perfectly cast and directed with a strained chemistry that at once binds and separates them.Read More »

Synopsis
The first box-office hit for Ozu in Japan, “The Brothers And Sisters Of The Toda Family” anticipates the later masterpieces such as “Tokyo Story” and “The End Of Summer”.

After the death of the father of an upper-class family, his wife and daughter have to struggle to survive. Tensions arise when they moved in with a married son, so they continue to move around from one household to the next, but they are always unwelcomed. When her youngest son returns from work in Tianjin, he scolds his siblings for their selfishness.

AWARDs
WON:
Kinema Junpo Awards – 1942 – Best FilmRead More »

Synopsis:
Zaizen Goro may only be an assistant professor but he has already made a name for himself. His superior, however, does not approve of his attitude towards their profession, and is at odds over who to nominate as his successor. The selection of the new professor reveals a rich and complex political world inside Naniwa University.Read More »

Quote:
A fishing union depends on two brothers to make up the losses caused by the dishonest captains they replaced.
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A childless middle-aged couple faces a marital crisis of sorts.

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Taeko (Michiyo Kogure) despises and regularly deceives her quiet, saturnine husband, Mokichi (Shin Saburi), who works as a corporate executive and who only seems to come alive when visiting bars, racetracks, and arcades with a younger friend. Meanwhile, Taeko’s niece, Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima), resolves not to accept an arranged marriage and end up in an unloving relationship like that of her aunt and uncle. Read More »

Quote:
“8 Hours of Fear = 80 surprisingly entertaining minutes! This is the earliest Suzuki I’ve seen, before the man was even named “Seijun” (opening credits bill him by his birth name “Seitaro Suzuki”). A cast of diverse characters embark on a perilous bus journey (the railroad is out of commission, it seems) through known gangster territory. Think Stagecoach with yakuzas instead of attacking Apaches or Lifeboat with bumpy mountain roads in place of the high seas. Or, if you’re going to get all modern about it, maybe a slightly slower Speed (at 60mph).Read More »

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Audition is Takashi Miike’s neo-Darwinian exercise in terror, playing out like a comfy companion piece to Shall We Dance? before evolving into a torturous freakshow not unlike Baise-moi. Miike devilishly sets up a discordant relationship between commerce and affection when a filmmaker, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), uses an audition as a way of finding love. His cohort, Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), is concerned with the slump in the motion picture industry and advises Aoyama that only the fittest will survive: His deceased wife’s replacement should be good but not necessarily talented. (For him, only good girls can be good wives while only talented girls can shoot a movie.) The audition is then seen as a bridge between fantasy and reality—a successful experiment (or so it seems), for Asami (Eihi Shiina) appears to embody Aoyama’s every ideal.Read More »

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In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. Granny Orin is approaching 70, content to embrace her fate. Her widowed son Tatsuhei cannot bear losing his mother, even as she arranges his marriage to a widow his age. Her grandson Kesa, whose girlfriend is pregnant, is selfishly happy to see Orin die. Around them, a family of thieves are dealt with severely, and an old man, past 70, whose son has cast him out, scrounges for food. Will Orin’s loving and accepting spirit teach and ennoble her family?Read More »