📽️ Noguchi Haruyasu
🎭 Shishido Jō, Yamamoto Yōko, Omura Kon
💬 After the mysterious Joe of Spades kills an executive, their colleagues hire Murder Unincorporated, a company providing very - very - eccentric hitmen…
The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa by Stephen Prince
The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films.
A clever princess takes advantage of a courtly crisis to save the kingdom and arrange her own marriage in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s adaptation of the well-known kabuki play Narukami, The Beauty and the Dragon. https://wp.me/p1x9li-ktz
Yasujirō Ozu is probably the greatest and most influential film director that ever lived. Right now you can watch 10 (!) of his movies (that are otherwise hard to get) on French/German TV arte for free:
A sociopathic student takes revenge on a changing society by seducing wealthy women in Mikio Naruse's brooding noir, The Angry Street. https://wp.me/p1x9li-k5n
♦️ Yakuza Ladies Revisited: Love Is Hell / 新・極道の妻たち 惚れたら地獄 (1994)
🎥 Yasuo Furuhata
🎭 Shima Iwashita, Masumi Miyazaki, Hiroyuki Konishi
💬 The wife of a small Osaka family boss fights for the survival of her clan, whatever the cost…
Post-war teens take on injustice in the form of a problematic parent at their school in Ryuichi Takamori's cheerful youth movie, Here Because of You. https://wp.me/p1x9li-jSq
🕵🏻♀️ Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! / 探偵事務所２３ くたばれ悪党ども (1963)
📽️ Seijun Suzuki
🎭 Joe Shishido, Reiko Sasamori, Tamio Kawachi
💬 Maverick detective Tajima infiltrates a gang to expose their shady deals - and wisecracks/sings/dances his way into a whole lot of trouble!
The very unknown and hard to find Japanese film "Kairei" starring Johnny Cash is available on the Internet Archive, but hardly anyone knows anything about it because there are no known commercial editions with Japanese subtitles. So I subtitled it myself with Whisper AI, and it did an incredible job. An interesting movie! Now I am trying to figure out what to do with it. Any ideas welcome.
Employees at a nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s B-movie thriller, Ghost Man. https://wp.me/p1x9li-jG9
Naruse paints the predicament of a middle aged woman in post-war Japan with great subtlety and grace. His frame-within-a-frame shots are masterful. Reiko, a young widow bound by tradition and duty, she doesn't quite know how to react when faced with the declaration of love. It's a marvelous acting by Hideko Takamine. The ending is quite melodramatic but all worth it for a long tracking shot of Reiko running in the backdrop of a beautiful northern town. #yearning#mikionaruse#japanesecinema