Flic (2005)

Sometimes it's hard to determine what is real and what is a dream or a movie. This especially applies to Masahiro Kobayashi's Flic, which itself seems to be a reference to the French flic, or policeman, the Melville movie Un Flic, and the flicks themselves. In simplest terms, Murata is a policeman whose wife was …

Himizu (2011)

Himizu is two movies rather forcibly jammed together. One is an emotional powerhouse of a movie about a 14-year-old boy with a disastrously bad family, based on a manga. The other is a not quite focused movie about the effects of the Fukushima disaster, which occurred as the movie was going into production. Unfortunately, the …

Cold Fish / Tsumetai nettaigyo (2010)

Cold Fish takes the standard film story of the “innocent man drawn into crime” to its most extreme level, with all the blood and gore we might expect from the maker of Suicide Club, but with a detailed attention to character not seen in that gory predecessor. Nobuyuki is the very typical small businessman always …

Noriko’s Dinner Table (2006)

In simplest terms, Noriko is a teenaged girl from the provinces who runs away to Tokyo at Christmas and enters a world that she had never imagined possible. Instead of the story of a run-away drawn into the underbelly of prostitution and drugs that we might expect from such a beginning, Noriko's Dinner Table is …

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 …