Invoking Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s irreverent, artful kitsch, Federico Fellini’s carnivalesque grotesquerie, and Werner Schroeter’s impenetrable, autobiographical self-evidence, Ticket of No Return encapsulates the highly stylized, funny, frustrating, offbeat, decadent, intoxicating, and fevered delirium that is Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema. A chronicle of an archetypally beautiful, impeccably dressed woman “of antique grace and raphaelic harmony” eponymously called […]
On an uneventful evening at a gas station in Burkina Faso, a service attendant completes a transaction with a passing motorist and begins to enter the office when he is ambushed by two armed men who, after a brief struggle, manage to break free from him and wrest control of the cash box. But before […]
Tilaï opens to a long sequence, off-axis shot of a lone traveler moving away from view as he slowly traverses the arid, featureless plain on a lumbering, overburdened mule and disappears into the desolate horizon. It is an appropriately distanced and alienated introduction for the weary, but sanguine Saga (Rasmane Ouedraogo) who, after an extended […]
Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu) has settled into a complacent, domestic life of a widower with his adult children – his son Kazuo (Shinichiro Mikami) and daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita) – in postwar Tokyo. Michiko is his only daughter, and has naturally assumed the role of lady of the house after her mother’s death. Upon hearing […]
On the death anniversary of the Miwa family patriarch, Miwa’s gracious and noble widow Akiko (Setsuko Hara), their 24-year old daughter Ayako (Yôko Tsukasa), and brother Shukichi (Chishu Ryu), host a reunion with Miwa’s longtime friends for a memorial service and intimate reception at a seaside resort. The three middle-aged friends, who once competed in […]
Ohayo is a clever, humorous, and lighthearted glimpse into contemporary Japanese life, as seen through the eyes of the Hayashi brothers: Minoru (Koji Shidara) and Isamu (Masahiko Shimazu). In a close knit suburban village of 1950’s Japan, there is only one television set in the neighborhood, and the children religiously make an after school pilgrimage, […]