Begging for Love / Ai o kou hito (1998)

In simplest terms, Begging for Love is the story of a woman approaching 50 who decides to find the ashes of her father who died when she was about six. Before she finally finds and brings them to a final resting place, we have one of the most emotionally intense studies of family life and …

Bloom in the Moonlight / The Rentaro Taki Story / Waga ai no uta – Taki Rentaro monogatari (1993)

Japan's hurried rush to westernize in the late nineteenth century soon included western music. As noted several times earlier in this blog, this included the wholesale adoption of many Euro/American “folk songs” such as Home Sweet Home, Londonderry Air, or Auld Lang Syne fitted with new Japanese lyrics into the curriculum of the new primary …

Robinson’s Garden / Robinson no niwa (1987)

The “counter-culture” in Japanese movies has usually been shown through the lens of Shinjuku, of left-wing politics, or of punk rock. Robinson's Garden takes us into a “hippy” counter-culture, some 20 years after it appeared in America. When we first meet Kumi, she lives in some sort of commune, with people from various ethnic backgrounds …

Sharaku (1995)

The famous Japanese artist of the late 18th century known as Sharaku makes an ideal subject for a movie because absolute nothing is known about his life. His output has now been firmly dated by scholars to less than a year, but no one knows who he was before he became Sharaku, nor why he …

Cabaret / Kyabare* (1986)

In thrilling black and white, a young man at a jukebox wearing an American letter jacket is gunned down by a man in a fedora and trench coat. We follow him out into the alley of small bars but at the end is the Stardust Cabaret. Black & white dissolves into color as we enter …

Suicide Club / Suicide Circle / Jisatsu sakuru (2001)

As a sort of knock-off of Cure, Suicide Club follows a series of inexplicable deaths investigated by a detective who can find no connections between them, but ups the ante in terms of gore, confusion, and distractions. The opening is as shocking as any you are likely to find anywhere, as groups of schoolgirls in …

License to Live / Ningen gokaku (1998)

A young man suddenly wakes from a ten year coma, having skipped from age 14 to 24. In almost any nation's cinema, this would have become a comedy, with jokes built on trying to cope with all the new technology, changed family relationships, the loss of old school friends, and the need to go back …

Woman in Witness Protection / Marutai no onna (1997)

As with his Last Dance, Juzo Itami's Woman in Witness Protection is a comedy about the threat of death. There are shootings, attempted murders, and enough blood to satisfy any Japanese film-maker of the nineties except perhaps Takashi Miike. At the same time, it takes on a target far more dangerous than mere yakuza -- …

Samurai Fiction (1998)

While period movies appeared in the nineties, the old-fashioned chanbara was scarce on the ground, still for the most part the province of television. Samurai Fiction is a playful salute to the old-style chanbara, not quite parody or satire but still not to be taken as an attempt at a serious revival of the genre. …

Dead or Alive / Hanzaisha (1999)

So much is going on in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive that it is hard to know where to start. As in Fudoh, we begin with a blast of violence but much longer. To the sound of ear drum bursting rock, we are thrown into the night in Shinjuku, with intercut street scenes, a woman …