Tokyo Sonata (2008)

Though it was widely seen and written about on its initial release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata is so full of forgotten detail that it is more than worth a second or a third look. While it is the story of a salaryman who loses his job and almost loses his family, it is far more …

Retribution / (2006)

In Retribution, Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to the roots of Japanese horror movies in which a man is haunted by the ghost of a woman but, as we have come to expect from this director, in a new and more disturbing fashion than the other similar films in the J-horror revival. As in Cure and Charisma, …

Bright Future /Akarui mirai (2001)

The title of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future is presumably ironic, since by the end of the move there there seems to be no future for any of the principal characters, unless you consider a jellyfish the major character. Nimuri and Arita are in their mid twenties, working for a cleaning company. Neither seems to be …

Doppelganger / Dopperugenga (2003)

Japanese movies have a long tradition of starting in one direction and then suddenly changing tone to go a completely unexpected way, but rarely have they taken the turns to be found in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger. The doppelganger, of course, has long been a subject of horror stories and films, usually in the manner of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Guard from Underground / Jigoku no keibin (1992)

Like Sweet Home, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Guard from Underground* looks to Euro/American horror as its inspiration. We find a small number of people in a constricted environment being pursued and gradually killed, but instead of the Japanese traditional demonic force out for revenge, we have the psycho at large who was so prevalent in the eighties …

Bumpkin Soup / Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl / Blood of the Do-Re-Me-Fa Girl Roars / Do-re-mi-fa musume no chi wa sawagu (1985)

The country girl Akiko appears at a university campus in search of Yoshioka, the boy she has determined to marry (apparently because he took her virginity) and wanders into not a world of study but of continuously weird behavior. As she says, it's more like a constant festival or circus than a school. Yoshioka hasn't …

Sweet Home / Suito homu (1989)

Though basically an ignored genre flick at the time, Sweet Home was extremely significant historically. It served as the foundation for one of the earliest popular video games for home players, which due to a later loss of naming rights would later be called the Resident Evil games and movies.* More importantly for non-gamers, it …