Snake of June / Rokugatsu no hebi (2003*)

Some movies you watch and some movies you experience; despite being visually one of the most tightly and carefully crafted movies of all time, Shinya Tsukamoto's A Snake of June is a movie you experience. In a remarkable characterization by Asuka Kurosawa, Rinko seems to be a well-adjusted woman in her thirties. She works as …

Shinsetsu* (1942)

When Shinsetsu appeared on YouTube, it seemed like an opportunity to fill in a big hole in our knowledge about both Japan after Pearl Harbor and movies made by Gosho, whose tuberculosis prevented him from working for most of the forties. Many of the social aspects of the movie are still clear, but since the …

An Adolescent / Shojo/ Shoujyo (2001)

Shojo is one of the most passionate love stories to come from Japan since Manji, but at the same time it is one of the most disturbing movies of an era that produced many disturbing movies. Its story is simple – Yoko is a young woman who propositions Tomokowa like a prostitute but she refuses …

Kekko Kamen (2003-4)

In a nation whose film culture is often distinguished by its ventures into weirdness, one of the weirdest is the Kekko Kamen series. Kekko rides around Tokyo on her red motor scooter completely nude except for red gloves, boots, scarf, and a mask with floppy rabbit ears. But the series is not a pinku series …

When the Last Sword is Drawn / Mibu gishi den (2003)

When the Last Sword is Drawn takes us back to the Shinsengumi, but in a far more romanticized and sentimentalized form than we have usually seen. Told in flashbacks, it follows Yoshimura, a fictional character, seen first when he joined the company's ranks, then in later flashbacks filling in his life before he came to …

Moon Child (2003)

The moon child of the title is Kei, who is no child but is instead a vampire in the Dracula sense – he drinks blood, is eternal, and can only be destroyed by sunlight. First seen in Tokyo at the start of the millennium, he reappears throughout a sci-fi future life that concludes in the …

Vengeance for Sale / Vengeance is Such Good Business / Sukedachi-ya Sukeroku (2001)

Revenge is one of the foundation stones of storytelling, drama, and film in Japanese as well as European culture, and Kihachi Okamoto uses it in his last movie to make a sprightly comedy mixed with the cynicism about the Samurai Code to be found in the best sixties chanbara. Most Japanese vengeance movies fall into …

Doing Time / Inside Prison/ Keimusho no naka (2002)

Made in a time when American and Japanese movies and society often seemed to be merging, Doing Time reminds us that the Japanese still do things differently. Based on the autobiographical manga by Kazuichi Hanawa, it follows the life of the sixty-ish Hanawa as he serves a three-year term in prison. Unlike in prison movies …

Pulse* / Kairo (2001)

There doesn't seem any easier way to begin than to say that Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is quite possibly the greatest horror film ever made. In it, he has combined many of the themes of his earlier movies into an engrossing and terribly disturbing horror movie, while doing so without a drop of blood, a creaking …

Man Walking on Snow / Aruku, hito (2002)

Every morning seventy-year-old Nobuo wakes up, dresses, has a cigarette, and goes for a walk, stopping even in the middle of winter for an ice cream cone that he eats on his way to the salmon farm in Mashike, his small town on the north-west side of Hokkaido. He has his reasons for going to …