Floating Weeds is a 1959 film by Yasujiro Ozu and shot in colour by Kazuo Miyagawa, one of Japan’s most highly regarded cinematographers. It is a remake of Ozu’s own 1934 black-and-white silent film A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). The film takes place during a hot summer in 1958 at a seaside town in the Inland Sea. Read more…
Early Summer is a 1951 drama directed by Yasujiro Ozu and starring Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. Like most Ozu films, Early Summer deals with many issues ranging from communication problems between generations and the rising role of women in post-war Japan. Noriko lives contentedly in an extended family household that includes her parents and her brother’s family, but an uncle’s visit prompts the family to find her a husband. Read more…
Late Spring is a 1949 black and white film drama directed by YasujirÅ Ozu and starring Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara. Many consider this extremely chaste film between a father and his marriageable daughter his finest achievement. The story concerns Noriko, who lives happily with her widowed father and seems in no hurry to get married. Her father, a professor, however, wants to see her settled and conspires with his sister to trick Noriko into pursuing an arranged marriage. Read more…
Drunken Angel is a 1948 Kurosawa movie starring Takashi Shimura as an alcoholic doctor in postwar Japan who treats a young, small-time hood named Matsunaga (ToshirÅ Mifune), after a gunfight with a rival syndicate. The doctor diagnoses the young gangster with tuberculosis, and convinces him to begin treatment for it. The two enjoy an uneasy friendship until the gangster’s former boss is released from prison and seeks to take his gang over once again. The sick young man then stops following the doctor’s advice, slips back into old habits and threatens to kill him, while his life is further endangered by his gangster lifestyle. Read more…
Shall We Dance? is an immensely popular 1996 movie starring Kôji Yakusho & Tamiyo Kusakari and directed by Masayuki Suo.
The film begins with a close-up of the inscription above the stage in the ballroom of the Blackpool Tower: “Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear”, from the poem Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. As the camera pans around the ballroom giving a view of the dancers, a voice-over explains that in Japan, ballroom dancing is treated with suspicion. Read more…
Captive Files I is an edgy thriller about an intense, middle-aged postal worker who kidnaps a university student and confines her long enough that he may have successfully made her his pet… a thrilling criminal-drama with a surprise twist that will satisfy all audiences.
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An Autumn Afternoon is 1962 drama and the final movie directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Known in Japan as Sanma no Aji (literally, “The Taste of a Pacific saury”), the film stars Chishu Ryu as the patriarch of the Hirayama family who oversees the wedding of his daughter, played by Shima Iwashita. Read more…
Lady Snowblood is a 1973 Japanese movie directed by Toshiya Fujita and starring Meiko Kaji. It is based on the manga of the same name and follows the story of the titular assassin seeking vengeance upon the bandits who raped her mother and murdered her father. Read more…
The Quiet Duel is an early (1949) Kurosawa film in which ToshirÅ Mifune plays a young idealistic doctor, still a virgin, who works at his father’s clinic in a small and seedy district. During a life-saving operation he cuts himself contaminates himself and contracts syphilis, which at the time was virtually incurable. Read more…
Rhapsody in August is a 1991 movie by Akira Kurosawa. The story centers on an elderly atomic bomb victim, who lost her husband in the 1945 attack on Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to visit him before he dies. Read more…