One of my favorite recent DVD purchases is Belgian animation filmmaker Raoul Servais’ L’Intégrale des courts métrages anthology from France. In addition to the ten short films in the collection (some of which can be viewed at Atom Films), there are also extracts from all of his remaining films (including his one feature film, Taxandria), […]
A collaboration between famed Korean Kazakhstanian novelist, Anatoly Kim and filmmaker Ermek Shinarbaev (who was also on-hand to present the film and participate in a subsequent Q&A session), Revenge is a sumptuous and intricately structured epic tale on the contaminative, destructive, and overreaching consequences of revenge. Structured in thematically spiraling, narratively overlapping novellas, the film’s […]
A well-crafted riff on Yasujiro Shimazu’s familiar shomin-geki films, this time transplanted to a group of Western opera stage actors working in the bustling theater and entertainment district of Asakusa in old downtown Tokyo, The Lights of Asakusa is a charming and elegantly realized ensemble slice-of-life serio-comedy. Centering on the acting troupe’s attempts to harbor […]
From the seemingly effortless opening tracking shot through a middle-class neighborhood that terminates to a shot of two young men practicing baseball pitches in the backyard of their suburban home (and accidentally breaking the window of a neighbor’s home), Yasujiro Shimazu illustrates his remarkable agility with the medium in the sublime shomin-geki (home drama), Our […]
In a pivotal encounter during Children of the Wind, the Aoyamas’ rambunctious younger son, Sanpei (Jun Yokoyama, credited in the film as Bakudan kozo, or “explosive boy”), having been sent to live temporarily with his uncle (Takeshi Sakamoto) and aunt (Fumiko Okamura), befriends an orphaned circus performer played by frequent prewar Ozu child actor Aoki […]
One of my favorite sequences in any film is the remarkably fluid lateral dolly shot through the financially ruined Furusawa household that opens Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion, so it is particularly satisfying to see Hiroshi Shimizu further refining this technique in the seemingly effortless, long take, outdoor tracking shot of a pair of […]