Owl / Fukuro (2003)

At the age of ninety, in Owl Kaneto Shindo wrote and directed one of the sprightliest sex comedies I have come across from Japan at any time. Comedy is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when we mention Shindo but it was not unknown in his movies, with the often ribald Edo Porn …

Enchantment / Yuwakusha (1989)

Sotomura is a psycho-analyst with a very small clinic in Tokyo, including a receptionist Harumi, with whom he is having an affair. One day at closing time, Miyako comes to talk to him about her roommate Nimie who has attacked her. As he is leaving, he sees her get in a taxi driven by another …

My Secret Cache / Secret Garden / Himitsu no hanazono (1997)

It has often been said that casting is everything in making a movie, and few better examples exist than My Secret Cache, though the director and editor's skill play a large part as well in making what could have been a very off-putting storyline into a charming, delightful comedy. Sakiko is a young woman who …

Helpless (1996)

The yakuza movie in the nineties showed greater flexibility than in the heyday of the sixties, but few were more flexible than Helpless, the debut film of Shinji Aoyama. Combining elements of the yakuza movie and the road movie, it tracks two people – Yasuo, a yakuza just released from prison, and Kenji, a friend …

Class to Remember / Gakko (1993)

Yoji Yamada's Gakko is the first of a quartet of movies with the same title but not really a series. The opening movie finds us in a classroom of a night school for students in what the subtitles call junior high, with the primary focus on one small class and the teacher Kuroi. This is …

Deep River / Fukai kawa (1995)

The Deep River of the title is the Ganges, but it is also the deep river of spirituality and faith. Based on the last novel by Shusaku Endo, it follows four major characters on a visit to Varanasi, a holy city to Hindus, Muslims, and also to Buddhists as the site of the Buddha's first …

Cure / (1997)

Ironically, there is no cure to be found for the question continually asked in Cure – Who are you? This marks it as one of the most disturbing, significant, and haunting horror films from any nation. Like most of us, Takabe answers the question with his job – “I am a detective” – but the …

Sada (1998)

It would be hard to imagine a more unexpected approach to the story of Sada Abe than to be found in Obayashi's Sada. Playing with multiple film styles and tone in an abundance greater even than Tampopo, it tries to tell the whole story of Sada's life from her rape at 14 to her arrest …

Black Angel / Kuro no tenshi (1998)

Black Angel gives us not one but two “Black Angels,” women dressed in black with the power of life and death. This being a Takashi Ishii movie, that power comes from a gun, and there is hardly a scene in the movie when someone is not loading, pointing, or firing a gun. In many ways, …

A Quiet Life / Shizukana seikatsu (1995)

Iiyo is a young man who was born with brain damage, still living with his family. Father is a famous author known only as K, but readers of modern literature will immediately recognize him as Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, whose fiction often dealt with his own complex relationship with his similar son. Oe was …