Yatsuko Tanami

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A three part-film based on short stories about the difficult lot of women in the early Meiji era. This is the film that swept almost all the Japanese awards for the year of Tokyo Story and Ugetsu (among others great films) — and lost to the fairly inconsequential Gate of Hell at the Cannes Festival. Imai and Kinoshita (and not Ozu, Naruse or Mizoguchi) were the most popular (and critically acclaimed) directors of the Japanese Golden Age of the 50s. While I find the contemporaneous adulation for Kinoshita beyond my understanding, I have found the few Imai films I’ve seen fairly impressive. And this is no exception.Read More »

This anthology helmed by four talented filmmakers, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Hiromichi Horikawa, and Roman Polanski, allows viewers to meet and observe four international con artists. Each story is set within a different city. “Amsterdam” follows the attempts of a seductive Dutch woman to entice an elderly man into buying her an expensive necklace in exchange for sex. He does, and she immediately runs away and uses the bauble, not realizing that it is worth a fortune, to purchase a parrot. In “Paris,” a con man sells a tourist rube the Eiffel Tower.Read More »