Early Monday morning, four overworked, dedicated counselors are given a motivational speech by their supervisor in preparation for the week’s heavy caseload. A distant bell tolls, and one by one, people emerge from the fog into an empty station, declare their names to an unseen receptionist, and bide their time in the waiting room before […]
An elderly woman (Kikuko Hashimoto) abstractedly walks down the sidewalk of a high traffic bridge, as she often does, determined to return to her childhood village. Her granddaughter chases after her, imploring her to come home, but she continues to walk on. When evening comes, the grandmother’s idiosyncratic ritual becomes cause for concern when she […]
Unfolding with the deceptively lyrical and darkly comic surrealism of a diluted Emir Kusturica, Pornography, a film based on a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, is the powerful and haunting tale of an acutely sensitive and enigmatic, middle-aged artist named Frederic (Krzysztof Majchrzak) who, as the film begins, has returned to a luxury hotel in German-occupied […]
In a time of sustained peace, the powerful daimyo (feudal warlords) have become resigned to an existence of pointless exercises and petty bureaucracy in a determined effort to retain privilege and curry favors from Edo. In an attempt to stave off boredom, Lord Matsudaira’s (Tatsuo Matsumura) seasoned swordsman, Isaburo Sasahara (Toshirô Mifune) and his trusted […]
The retainer log book for the Official Residence of Lord Iyi reports that at midday on an otherwise uneventful day on the thirteenth of May 1630, during the absence of the Honorable Heir Bennosuke, a gaunt, former retainer of the Lord of Geishu arrives at the mansion gates and is granted an interview with the […]
Masaki Kobayashi’s six-part magnum opus, The Human Condition, based on Junpei Gomikawa’s postwar novel, bears the imprint of Kobayashi’s tutelage under legendary filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita at Shochiku’s Ofuna studio, a critical, introspective, and deeply personal account of wartime Japan framed from the perspective of an idealistic everyman (and Kobayashi’s alterego), Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai). Opening to […]