Women in the Mirror / Kagami no onna-tachi (2002)

For his final movie, Yoshishige Yoshida returns to the world of his cryptic studies made in the late sixties, almost all of which starred Mariko Okada and were about women trying to find their true self. Women in the Mirror eventually takes us into the search for the true self of three different women. For …

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 …

Girl of Silence / Fazafakka (1995)

There have been many Japanese movies about sex and the teen-aged girl, but few are as disturbing to watch as Girl of Silence. Shizuko is 14 when her mother brings home a new man. She has her first sexual experience with a boy in her school class, and very awkward it is for both of …

Rhapsody in August / Hachigatsu no rapusodi (1991)

Himself one of the last of the Japanese directors to have experienced the war years as an adult, Kurosawa in 1991 used Kiyoko Murata's novella of a woman spending time with her grandchildren as a basis for a movie about the lasting after-effects of the Nagasaki bombing. While Kinoshita had dealt with the blast and …

Tomorrow / Ashita (1988)

Movies can show many things and have many effects on their audience, but even so, it's rare to find a movie that is simply overwhelming. In 1988, Japan produced two of them, one of which (Grave of the Fireflies) is still remembered and admired today, the other of which was essentially unknown outside Japan and, …

Children of Nagasaki / Kono ko wo nokoshite (1983)

Nagasaki is often the ignored city in the atomic bomb history, with most attention still given to Hiroshima. Kinoshita's Children of Nagasaki looks at the effects of that bombing, and as such its subject matter rather overwhelms any urge to criticize the film as a whole. However, because it is placed in Nagasaki, it is …

Apart from Life / Chi no mure (1970)

Kei Kumai spent most of his long independent film career making movies about the parts of Japanese life the Japanese didn’t really want to talk about. As a result, though often recognized by critics, he rarely had real commercial success and only his very last movie saw a commercial release in the US, probably because …

Where Spring Comes Late / Family / Kazoku (1970)

Spring comes late in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and it comes late for the family of So and Tami, who left their home on an island south of Nagasaki to make the long rail journey north to find a job for the husband. The story of their trip is one of the warmest, …

Silence Has No Wings / Tobenai chinmoku (1966)

Japanese film-makers in the sixties dealt with the legacy of WWII in many different ways, but the most elliptic, hypnotic, and visually fascinating attempt is certainly Kazuo Kuroki’s Silence Has No Wings. A young boy in Hokkaido captures a rare butterfly which his teachers refuse to believe he didn’t buy in a store, since it …

Express Train / Kigeki kyuko ressha (1967)

One of the relatively unique genres of Japanese movies is what I've elsewhere called the slice-of-life comedy. When dealing with the salaryman world, this is usually called the shomin-geki, but Americans can occasionally find DVDs of these kinds of comedies that lie slightly outside the shomin-geki world, of which Express Train is a thoroughly entertaining …