“NY Times wrote:
RICHARD SCHECHNER’S “Dionysus in 69” played during 1968 and 1969 in a converted garage on Wooster Street. Brian De Palma made his movie version in the course of just two actual performances. It opened yesterday at the Kips Bay Theater.

Although rough in a few technical details, it is a film of extraordinary grace and power. With exceptional imagination and intelligence, De Palma has managed both to preserve the complex immediacies of Schechner’s dramatic event (based on “The Bacchae” of Euripides) and to work those immediacies into the passionate and formal properties of his own creationRead More »

This film was seen at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series, February 2006

Sloppy, silly, and incoherent writing mars writer/director Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s moodily detailed atmosphere in Loft, a story of mummies, cloying book editors, a haunted archeologist, and a hodgepodge of other, random horror paraphernalia. The film starts out with prize-winning novelist Reiko (Nakatani Miki) suffering not only from writer’s block but also from hallucinations and fits that involve coughing up viscous black mud. To help his famous protégé write a “popular romance novel,” Reiko’s editor rents her a house in the countryside, one that borders a creepy concrete building housing the local university’s head mummy researcher, Yoshioka (Toyokawa Etsushi). Reiko is not the only one suffering pressures of work and spirit. Yoshioka himself is experimenting on preserving a 1000-year old female mummy dredged up from the local lake, but is hounded by a colleague who wants him to present the find, and a spooky ghost-girl clad in black who peaks around corners at the most inopportune times.Read More »

A doctor, gynaecologist, discover the corpse of his wife. His nurse advises to him to declare her death a simple heart attack, to clear himself without the slightest doubt. He refuses and calls the police force there. The interrogation of the doctor, then other witnesses, slowly reveals the truth of her demise…Read More »

~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide wrote:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa grabbed worldwide attention with his 1997 masterpiece Cure, a horror film that was actually horrifying. Sandblasting away all the campy cliches of 1970s quickies, Cure employed intelligent camera work, lighting, sound design, and a good story — and very little special effects — to prove that horror flicks can also be art. Kurosawa shows that he has lost none of his abilities to scare in this film. The first 30 minutes of Kairo is perhaps some of the most unnerving, frightening sequences to come down the pike in a long time. And Kurosawa accomplishes this with admirable economy, using little dramatizing music or flash camera trickery.Read More »

A documentary was made during the production process of Bright Future, called Aimai Na Mirai (Ambivalent Future). It was released in theaters in Japan and it’s available on the Japanese DVD release of Bright Future. The documentary was not so much a making-of as an interpretation of your work, with Bright Future functioning as a case study. What did you think when you saw it?

I didn’t watch it so attentively, because I felt a bit embarrassed about watching myself. I kept thinking “What a liar this director is!” (laughs). And I understood the difference between documentary filmmakers and fiction filmmakers. Documentarists shoot elements of reality, and after that in post-production they try to turn it into a lie as much as possible. Directors like me who make fiction – and I’ve never made a documentary – we deal with fictional elements such as the script, but after that we try to make them as close to reality as possible, and try not to lie as much possible. It’s the complete opposite.

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After receiving a letter from a woman named Asiye asking for help to save her, the President of the Associations Against Prostitution visits the brothel to save Asiye. However, she finds herself in a strange musical show.Read More »

This serial killer suspense thriller by Robert Altman was originally broadcast as an episode of Kraft Mystery Theater, then expanded into a longer cut and released to theaters. It stars Charles McGraw, Ted Knight, and Carroll O’Connor, among others, and features an orchestral musical score by John Williams (billed as “Johnny Williams”) before he became famous with his scores for Jaws, Star Wars, and Superman.Read More »

Cult director Koji Wakamatsu (famous abroad for titles such as “Go, Go Second Time Virgin”) returns to helm the sixth in this perversely entertaining series. A Kabukicho gigolo with a gambling debt Mikio Osawa agrees to bump off a rich wife’s husband for a bundle of cash, but botches the hit. On the run in the snow-covered hills of northern Japan, he holes up in a shuttered, deserted house. But the house is not empty: a timid, traumatized girl Mika Ito lives there, in the thrall of a sick, hot-tempered trucker Shiro Sano who has kept her there since she was a tiny girl. Osawa tries hard but looks out of his depth here, as veteran Sano and 23-year-old ingenue Ito build an all-too-believable, monstrous relationship as sadistic paternal pervert and terrified tremulous child. File under guilty pleasure.Read More »

Synopsis: A female fashion model Anni Stark (played by Tiina Björkman) takes leave from the fashion business and goes to Finland’s Lappland (a wilderness region in Northern Finland, better known as the home of Santa Claus) for a vacation. Little does she know that there’s a totally lunatic bunch of local hillbillies living in a nearby farmhouse. The plot thickens as one of the residents begins to harass Anni, who is left alone in the wilderness with only her dog to protect her. Too bad for her that her dog turns out to have divided loyalties..

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