Japan

Blessed with several large rivers, interconnected streams and springs, Japan’s ancient capital, Kyoto, anoints the land with a bountiful source of water. In this tranquil setting, three women join the flow of a small community with the subtle presence of a spring breeze. Setsuko , the proprietor of a whiskey-only bar; Takako, the owner of a coffee shop along the waterway; Hatsumi, a maker of tofu so delicious it seems to spring forth from the clear water. Under their subtle influence, other townspeople gradually begin their own streams too: Yamanoha, a local worker for a furniture workshop; Otome, the owner of a neighborhood public bath; Jin, a young man who assists him at the bath; Makoto, a wayfarer about the town. Among their daily lives, there is Poplar, a small child with a perpetually friendly smile.Read More »

Critical Appraisal (From Wiki)
Midnight Eye’s review of A Woman Called Sada Abe compares it to In the Realm of the Senses, notes, “Aside from being less sexually explicit, it is also smaller scale, more intimate, more cinematically stylised and arguably more erotic.”[5]

A Woman Called Sada Abe is generally considered one of Nikkatsu’s five best Roman porno films.[1] Many Japanese critics consider it to be superior to Oshima’s internationally better-known In the Realm of the Senses, and Junko Miyashita is called a more realistic Sada Abe than Eiko Matsuda.[2] Miyashita’s performance in the film has been judged one of the best of her career, and the film has been called director Tanaka’s masterpiece.[1]Read More »

from wikipedia::
The plot follows a country doctor’s hapless struggle to attend a sick young boy in the cold winter night. A series of surreal events occur upon the journey including a mysterious groom’s appearance in a pig shed.

The story begins with a country doctor having to urgently attend a sick patient. But his sole horse has died the night before, so he fetches his maid (Rosa) to look for a horse. The maid returns empty-handed, but, as the doctor expresses his total loss of hope by kicking the sty door, a mysterious groom appears from nowhere and supplies the doctor with ethereal horses. The groom boorishly kisses the maid and runs after her to her house. The doctor wants to help Rosa, but the horses quickly transport him to his sick patient’s courtyard, as if the courtyard opens just outside his gate (in reality it’s 10 miles away).Read More »

Synopsis/ Plot:

High school teacher Seiji Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is the most popular teacher at his school with an attractive smile. Yet, Seiji Hasumi is a psychopath. To solve some of his school’s problems, like bullying, and to protect himself, Seiji begins to kill his students one by one.Read More »

Quote:
Simon Wade is an average young man who goes about his profession as a teacher with the same kind of dedication that he exhibits when taking care of his ailing mother. But, under the seemingly obliging surface of nice-guy Simon there lurks an entirely different side. His unquenchable thirst for fresh blood forces the young teacher to trawl websites in search of suicidal young women, whose blood he can steal.Read More »

From IMDB:
The film follows Nishi, a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, the film follows Nishi as he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place. Nishi (and some friends) attempt to break out of their trap, and discover what it truly means to be alive along the way. This is a mind-bending trip that uses some of the most innovative animation ever created. Written by animenewsnetwork.com

This award-winning film is a journey of self-discovery based on Japan’s cult underground comic “Mind Game” by Robin Nishi. The story follows Nishi himself through the life experiences that directly inspired the semi-autobiographical “Mind Game” comic. As a college-age loser addicted to porn and aspiring to write seedy adult comics, Nishi aspires to overcome his addiction to perversion in a tale that is lighthearted yet painful and touching. What starts off as an innocent meeting between old friends quickly turns into a psychedelic extravaganza, filled with violence, sex, love, redemption, and the infinite possibilities of the human mind. Director Masaaki Yuasa rejoices in experimental animation techniques, filling the screen with virtuoso wackiness, mixing in rough lines and storyboards, then inserting photographic touches. Written by Anonymous “Read More »

Quote:
With an arresting mix of eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution in Empire of Passion (Ai no borei). Set in a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, the film details the emotional and physical downfall of a married woman and her younger lover following their decision to murder her husband and dump his body in a well. Empire of Passion was Oshima’s only true kaidan (Japanese ghost story), and the film, a savage, unrelenting experience, earned him the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival.Read More »

Quote:
Cut, by Iranian expatriate Amir Naderi, is a brilliantly offbeat homage to Japanese cinema,” blogs Kieron Corless for Sight & Sound. “It opens on a rootop in Tokyo, where keeper-of-the-flame filmmaker protagonist Shuji projects classic films to a group of friends. The rest of the time he spends haranguing the citizens of Tokyo through a megaphone about the destruction of ‘pure cinema’ by crass commercial fodder, and visiting the graves of Japanese masters Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. The film then takes, via the death of his brother at the hands of the yakuza, what seems at first a strange but wonderful detour. Shuji must now clear, in just two weeks, a massive debt that his brother accumulated to finance Shuji’s films; the unexpected method he hits on to do so opens up frightening perspectives on the depths of his devotion to cinema, in the most masochist way imaginable.Read More »

Synopsis
An old man and a young woman meet in Tokyo. She knows nothing about him, he thinks he knows her. He welcomes her into his home, she offers him her body. But the web that is woven between them in the space of twenty-four hours bears no relation to the circumstances of their encounter.
Festival de Cannes.com

Reviews
According to Martin Scorsese, “cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame, and what’s out.” The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami applies this axiom with particular rigor. In the first scenes of Mr. Kiarostami’s latest feature, “Like Someone in Love,” we are very much aware of what is not in the frame. We are in a Tokyo bar, listening to a series of conversations that involve a woman we cannot see… he structure of the film is, by Mr. Kiarostami’s standards, fairly straightforward, even conventional: it has a teasing start, an expository middle and a startlingly (though not unpredictably) dramatic end. And yet every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.
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