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Mitsuo Yanagimachi – Jukyusai no chizu AKA The Nineteen Year-Old’s Map (1979)
Quote: Yanagimachi’s first feature film is about a young man who makes a map of a neighborhood in which he delivers newspapers. He keeps a dossier on each family, recording their habits and rating how...
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Stephen Chow – Cheung Gong 7 hou aka CJ7 (2008)
A poor Chinese laborer learns important lessons after his son gets a strange new toy. Plot: Construction worker Ti (Stephen Chow) lives in a ramshackle shanty and scavenges everything from shoes to...
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Shunji Iwai – Ichikawa Kon monogatari AKA The Kon Ichikawa Story (2006)
Summary from yesasia – “It has been three years since pop auteur Iwai Shunji’s last film Hana and Alice, and his latest offering may seem a bit surprising. In a marked departure from his previous...
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Kôji Wakamatsu – Kabe no naka no himegoto AKA Secrets behind the wall aka...
壁の中の秘事 Three or four different stories of people living in the same apartment complex, adultery couple, student lost in voyeurism or just a lonely wife. Emotions and feelings generated by poor...
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Mitsuo Yanagimachi – Himatsuri AKA Fire Festival (1985)
Quote: Situated between the mountains of Kumano and the deep blue sea, the population of the rural seaside fishing town of Nigishima falls neatly into one of three categories: mountain people, sea...
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Seijun Suzuki – Mikkô zero rain AKA Smashing The 0-Line (1960)
Two reporters from competing newspapers and different moral setups investigate a drug ring, delving deeper into the underworld in the process....
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Kinji Fukasaku & Koreyoshi Kurahara – Seishun no mon AKA The Gate Of Youth...
This hard-to-find Fukasaku/Kurahara collaboration is an interesting coming-of-age story. The boy Shisuke grows up in a coal mining community in Kyushu, during and after the Second World War, and the...
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Hiroshi Shimizu – Hachi no su no kodomotachi AKA Children of the Beehive (1948)
The movie focuses on the plight of ten war orphans hailing from different cities across Japan. With nowhere to go, they scavenge around train stations, scratching out an existence by means of black...
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Shunji Iwai – Hana to Arisu AKA Hana and Alice [+Extra] (2004)
“DVD Talk” wrote: Though overlong at 135 minutes, Hana & Alice (Hana to Arisu, 2004) is another intriguing effort by its jack-of-all-trades filmmaker, Shunji Iwai, who not only wrote and directed...
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Teruo Ishii – Edogawa ranpo taizen: Kyofu kikei ningen AKA Horrors of...
PLOT SUMMARY After escaping from an asylum, young medical student Hirosuke assumes the identity of a dead man in order to solve the mystery of a weird doppelganger whose picture he sees in the...
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Shinji Sômai – Ohikkoshi AKA Moving (1993)
Quote: Renko’s mum and dad are splitting up, and her heart is burning. So she plays with fire, tears up the rule book, holds herself hostage, even starts talking to the weird girl in school who’s the...
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Kazuo Kuroki – Ryoma ansatsu aka The Assassination of Ryoma (1974)
This was also voted No.55 on 1999’s Kinema Jumpo Poll of Top 100 Japanese Films of All Time. It’s a samurai film but its style is rather different from those Toei & Daiei jidaigeki in 50s &...
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Dharmasena Pathiraja – Ponmani AKA Younger Sister (1977)
Ponmani comes from the highest caste in Tamil society, but her family has fallen on hard times and can’t even pay what they owe on her married eldest sister’s dowry, let alone find dowries for her and...
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Dharmasena Pathiraja – Bambaru Avith AKA The Wasps Are Here (1977)
Malini Fonseka and Vinjaya Kamaratunga acted together in 41 films, and The Wasps are Here (1978) is one of their pairings. Fonseka is a young girl engaged to a young fisherman and Kamaratunga is the...
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Sogo Ishii – Gyakufunsha kazoku AKA The Crazy Family (1984)
The Kobayashi family finally get the chance to move out of their tiny, cramped Tokyo apartment in favour of the suburban house of their dreams. But all is not well: the house is infested by termites...
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Kwon-taek Im – Sibaji aka Surrogate Woman (1987)
Quote: m’s first international prize-winner (best actress for Kang at Venice) is a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attack on the principles of male lineage and ancestor worship in the traditional Korean...
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Kon Ichikawa – Bonchi (1960)
Where Ichikawa skewered patriarchal family values in Her Brother, in this savage satire he hoists the matriarchal system on its own apron strings. Raizo Ichikawa (“in his best role yet”-Variety) is...
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Chan-wook Park – Saibogujiman kwenchana aka I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK (2006)
Plot Synopsis [AMG] After wrapping-up his critically-acclaimed “Vengeance Trilogy” with the award-winning 2005 thriller Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, South Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park shifts gears...
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Hsiao-Hsien Hou – Feng er ti ta cai AKA Play While you Play AKA Cheerful Wind...
The pop-star leads from Hou’s first feature, Cute Girl, are reunited in the director’s follow-up, a brisk work of bubble-gum romance that begins to experiment with the rules of the genre. This time,...
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Ki-duk Kim – Shi gan AKA Time (2006)
South Korean maverick Kim Ki-duk takes a scalpel to the local obsession with appearances in “Time,” in which a young couple resort to plastic surgery to perk their relationship — with unexpected...
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