Practically a template for post-war Ozu — by Ozu’s (slightly) senior colleague at Shochiku. Shimazu’s millieu here (reasonably well off middle class) and domestic dilemmas presented are closer to late Ozu than pre-war Ozu is. Shin Saburi is a salaryman married to Kuniko Miyake (an Ozu mainstay from the 40s through the 60s), with a younger sister (Michiko Kuwano). Saburi has job problems — and has to worry about marriage prospects of his sister (who is a westernized office girl). Whenever the family runs into problems, they turn to family friend Chishu Ryu (playing a part very like that he plays in Ozu’s Early Spring). The solution to the family’s woes, however, betrays its era — a move to Japanese-occupied Manchuria as colonists.Read More »

Towards the end of the Shahanshah’s reign, Sergeant Makvandi is assigned the commander of the gendarmerie station in a small town. A stern disciplinarian, Sergeant Makvandi tries to impose order at the station but, being as degenerate as his subordinates, he fails to re-store discipline. faced by rebellious crowds, he imposes martial law, but people outwit him by mailing to his address a forged letter which “promotes the sergeant and ends the curfew”. Makvandi tries to intimidate a school teacher into writing a song which he wants the students to sing on the day his “promotion” comes into effect. But the teacher refuses to give in, for he and his students are preparing to sing a new song, the song of revolution.Read More »

Set in chaotic 1920s China, when warlords fought each other for power while Sun Yat-Sen’s underground movement tried to establish a democratic republic, the movie tells the story of three young women and two young men who are thrown together. One young woman grabs a box of jewels during the looting when one warlord takes Peking. A deserting soldier joins her, but the jewels end up at the Peking Opera. Here we meet the daughter of the head of the troupe, who dreams of being an actress. But even female roles are played by men in the opera. Soon, the daughter of the currently ruling warlord and a male agent of the democratic underground are involved.Read More »

Adaptation of Molière’s comedy “The Imaginary Invalid”, about a hypochondriac, his doctor, his daughter and her lover.Read More »

A computer hacker is abducted into a digital world and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program.Read More »

Synopsis:
1950’s, France, by the serene banks of the Marne River. François, a daydreaming child of boundless imagination, has his life changed when his father decides to start building a boat in the garden. Thus begins the family’s grand odyssey, a collective venture to construct a boat that would carry them away – somewhere between reality and reverie.Read More »

The story of the couple from the very first meeting to break up told from a view of a man, Jean-Marc. The film shares the same plot with “Françoise ou La vie conjugale”, that tells the same story from another perspective.Read More »

An unforgettable mixture of bubblegum teen melodrama and grisly phantasmagoria, Obayashi’s deranged fairy tale House is one of Japanese cinema’s wildest supernatural ventures and a truly startling debut feature.

Distressed by her widowed father’s plans to remarry, Angel sets off with six of her schoolgirl friends in tow for a summer getaway in her aunt’s isolated mansion. But all is not well – in this house of dormant secrets, long-held emotional traumas have terrifyingly physical embodiments and the girls will have to use all their individual talents if any are to survive.Read More »

Quote:
Essentially a drama about the lives of the Hungarian Hortobagy plains horsemen and peasants, with a slight fictional storyline to hang it all on. The coming of ‘machines’ threatens the way of life of these peoples, and most of them want no contact with tractors or even bicycles. But not everyone agrees.Read More »