Blind Beast.You could start cradled like the kidnapped woman in the undulating foam curves that resemble a gigantic female torso in Blind Beast (1969). You could make your approach via the swing of a Super-8 camera towards the steps of a courthouse at the beginning of A Wife Confesses (1961). You could drift into A Cheerful Girl (1957) through the kitchen window, onto a table laden with groceries and bottles of fluorescent orange soda-pop. You could inject yourself like morphine into Red Angel (1966), seep like body ink into the skin of Spider Tattoo (1966), or slide into the fevered bloodstream of All Mixed Up (1964) like powdered poison swallowed from a kite-paper pouch. Whether you arrive on the tip of a blade or the cusp of a kiss, there is no wrong place to start with Yasuzo Masumura, the postwar Japanese director whose astonishing accomplishment should by rights have him mentioned in the same...
- 8/15/2023
- MUBI
The Daughters of Fire.Three square images, placed side by side on the screen. The full frame is as wide as CinemaScope, which Fritz Lang famously said was only suitable for snakes and funerals. On the left, a woman stares forward as she stalks, like a Jacques Tourneur character, toward no certain destination; as she does so—singing, half her face shrouded in shadow—she passes through a seemingly endless corridor of ash, an ever-rotating carousel of clay streaked with wisps of fire. In the center frame, another woman lies prone, bent over on the shores of a volcanic beach. The sea laps in apocalyptic, dusky light behind her, the horizon stretches out to the limits of vision; uncertainly, she heaves her body upright to sit as she sings. In the far-right frame, another woman peers out from around a doorframe, staring into the camera, also singing in direct counterpoint with the other two women,...
- 6/14/2023
- MUBI
This article contains spoilers from the Demon Slayer manga.
Now that Demon Slayer has slashed its way through two seasons, the trailer for season 3 is giving us a preview of some pretty sick moves and even sicker demons.
Gotoge Koyoharu’s manga, which was adapted by Ufotable, has already leapt off the page and into fantastic swordfighting action that will only level up as more demons are unleashed. The Swordsmith Village arc that will be featured this season isn’t nearly as tame as it sounds. This village is teeming with demons, and not just any demons, but the dreaded Twelve Kizuki that make up the upper ranks of Kibutsuji’s army. If it is anything like the manga, it will also be the season Inosuke shows more of his actual face than ever.
Season 3 premieres on Crunchyroll April 9. Grab your sword and get ready to face off against some terrifying forces of evil.
Now that Demon Slayer has slashed its way through two seasons, the trailer for season 3 is giving us a preview of some pretty sick moves and even sicker demons.
Gotoge Koyoharu’s manga, which was adapted by Ufotable, has already leapt off the page and into fantastic swordfighting action that will only level up as more demons are unleashed. The Swordsmith Village arc that will be featured this season isn’t nearly as tame as it sounds. This village is teeming with demons, and not just any demons, but the dreaded Twelve Kizuki that make up the upper ranks of Kibutsuji’s army. If it is anything like the manga, it will also be the season Inosuke shows more of his actual face than ever.
Season 3 premieres on Crunchyroll April 9. Grab your sword and get ready to face off against some terrifying forces of evil.
- 4/8/2023
- by Alec Bojalad
- Den of Geek
In a 1960 interview with Donald Richie, printed in the 2008 book "Akira Kurosawa: Interviews" edited by Bert Cardullo, Kurosawa admitted to a notable weakness he possessed as a filmmaker: he didn't make movies about women. Looking over the master's filmography reveals scant few notable female characters, and none occupying lead roles. Even "Ran," his 1985 adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" gender-swapped the play's three central sisters into brothers. Kurosawa, it seems, was more interested in -- or simply only capable of discussing -- the foibles and weaknesses of men and male-kind.
Kurosawa'a moment of introspection came during a conversation about the filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu, between them, represent one of the greatest waves of cinema the world has ever seen, sometimes called the Golden Age of Japanese cinema by critics. The latter two filmmakers frequently made films about women and the middle class. Mizoguchi in particular often told operatic tales of fallen women,...
Kurosawa'a moment of introspection came during a conversation about the filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu, between them, represent one of the greatest waves of cinema the world has ever seen, sometimes called the Golden Age of Japanese cinema by critics. The latter two filmmakers frequently made films about women and the middle class. Mizoguchi in particular often told operatic tales of fallen women,...
- 2/10/2023
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
One can't go without mentioning Mizoguchi's superb melodrama, Street of Shame (1959), when we talk about films about sex workers. Like Street of Shame, where there were five different individuals with their own stories to tell, Yamada Kana's Life: Untitled manages to tell a group of people, men and women, engaged in a ramshackled escort business. Adapting her own play in her debut film, Yamada weaves stories of empowerment, identity, misogyny, gender roles and how bottled-up sadness and anger materialize in the form of sociopathic behavior and violence. She also shows wealth of humanity in each character and brings out compassion and understanding. Not unlike Mizoguchi's film, Life: Untitled is a deeply moving film and sympathetic look at the world's oldest profession in modern Japan....
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 7/19/2020
- Screen Anarchy
Mubi's retrospective Yuzo Kawashima's Post-War Japan runs January - April, 2020. Il Cinema Ritrovato will be staging a retrospective on the director in 2020.Kawashima Yūzō is one of Japan's most beloved directors, and, curiously enough, maybe also one of the most written-about. Books and special editions of magazines keep coming; only in December 2018, one of Japan's finest publishers of film books with a special interest in post-war stylists and genre masters, Wides Shuppan, celebrated the master's centennial by unleashing a brick of texts on his cinema that feels mighty definite—until something even more extensive will come up, of course. In the absence of any formalist tics or overt thematic obsessions, Kawashima, it seems, is as much an auteur to love and venerate as he's a character to wonder about—the quirky stuff of melancholic legends one obsessively tries to find in his films, like eg. seeing his ideal of...
- 2/21/2020
- MUBI
Machiko Kyo, an actress who starred in some of the most internationally acclaimed Japanese films of the postwar era, died in Tokyo on Sunday at age 95, her former studio Toho announced Tuesday. The cause of death was heart failure.
Born in Osaka in 1924 as Motoko Yano, she joined the Osaka Shochiku Girls Opera in 1936 and, using the stage name Machiko Kyo, the Daiei studio in 1949. Though viewed by studio boss Masaichi Nagata as a Japanese answer to the voluptuous Hollywood sirens of the era, she first came to attention of the world as the sexually assaulted wife of a murdered samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” (1950). The winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, the film brought not only Kyo and Kurosawa but also Japanese cinema to the attention of the West.
Kyo followed up with starring roles in Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” (1953) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Gate of Hell...
Born in Osaka in 1924 as Motoko Yano, she joined the Osaka Shochiku Girls Opera in 1936 and, using the stage name Machiko Kyo, the Daiei studio in 1949. Though viewed by studio boss Masaichi Nagata as a Japanese answer to the voluptuous Hollywood sirens of the era, she first came to attention of the world as the sexually assaulted wife of a murdered samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” (1950). The winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, the film brought not only Kyo and Kurosawa but also Japanese cinema to the attention of the West.
Kyo followed up with starring roles in Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” (1953) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Gate of Hell...
- 5/15/2019
- by Mark Schilling
- Variety Film + TV
Non-FictionThe programme for the 2018 edition of the Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Tsai Ming-liang, Frederick Wiseman, Sergei Loznitsa, Olivier Assayas, the Coen Brothers, and many more.COMPETITIONFirst Man (Damien Chazelle)The Mountain (Rick Alverson)Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)The Ballad of Buster ScruggsVox Lux (Brady Corbet)Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)22 July (Paul Greengrass)Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino)Werk ohne autor (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)Peterloo (Mike Leigh)Capri-revolution (Mario Martone)What You Gonna Do When the World's On Fire? (Roberto Minervini)Sunset (László Nemes)Frères ennemis (David Oeloffen)Where Life is Born (Carlos Reygadas)At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel)Acusada (Gonzalo Tobal)Killing (Shinya Tsukamoto)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesThe Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles)They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Morgan Neville)L'amica geniale (Saverio Costanzo)Il diario di angela - noi...
- 7/25/2018
- MUBI
The Venice Film Festival is celebrating its 75th year in 2018 with a star-studded lineup that includes world premieres from Damien Chazelle, Bradley Cooper, Luca Guadagnino, and Alfonso Cuarón. The festival takes place August 29 to September 8 and marks the official kickoff of the 2018 fall awards season.
As has been previously announced, Damien Chazelle will open the festival with the world premiere of “First Man.” The space race drama stars Chazelle’s “La La Land” Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong and recounts the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The world premiere will be Chazelle’s second Venice opener after “La La Land.” Also confirmed prior to the announcement lineup was Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” which marks the actor’s directorial debut.
Check out the full lineup for the 2018 Venice Film Festival below. This year’s competition jury is led by Guillermo del Toro, who won the...
As has been previously announced, Damien Chazelle will open the festival with the world premiere of “First Man.” The space race drama stars Chazelle’s “La La Land” Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong and recounts the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The world premiere will be Chazelle’s second Venice opener after “La La Land.” Also confirmed prior to the announcement lineup was Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” which marks the actor’s directorial debut.
Check out the full lineup for the 2018 Venice Film Festival below. This year’s competition jury is led by Guillermo del Toro, who won the...
- 7/25/2018
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Any list of the greatest foreign directors currently working today has to include Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The directors first rose to prominence in the mid 1990s with efforts like “The Promise” and “Rosetta,” and they’ve continued to excel in the 21st century with titles such as “The Kid With A Bike” and “Two Days One Night,” which earned Marion Cotillard a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama
The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...
Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama
The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...
- 8/7/2017
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries.NEWSLast weekend the generally derided yet fiercely observed Golden Globes winners were announced 2016, which included La La Land (Best Director, Screenplay, Song, Score and Actor, Actress and picture for a musical/comedy), Moonlight (Best Drama), and Elle (Best Foreign Language film, Best Actress for a drama).Okay, it's not strictly cinema news, but 18 episodes of new moving pictures directed by David Lynch counts as news to us! Showtime has revealed the number of episodes of the upcoming season of Twin Peaks, all directed by Lynch, and that the two-hour premiere of the show will be on May 21, immediately followed by the digital release of the third and forth episodes. Those film professionals who will be in Cannes at the time better plan on skipping their Monday morning screenings!Great news for those, like us, still enamored by celluloid: Kodak has...
- 1/12/2017
- MUBI
Street of Shame is a beautiful drama film that follows the daily lives of five prostitutes situated in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red light district, during the mid-1950s. The American occupation has ended and the majority of the Japanese population is still struggling to get by after the destructive Second World War that ended over a decade ago. For the sex-workers times have become extra challenging as the Diet is considering to ban prostitution, which would mean losing their income. But for some it would also mean a way out of the life they are stuck in.
Street of Shame is the last film of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, director of timeless classics like Ugetsu (1953) and The Life of Oharu (1952). He died a few months after the film was released, leaving his audience with a strong motion picture as a closure to a prolific career. The film was a...
Street of Shame is the last film of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, director of timeless classics like Ugetsu (1953) and The Life of Oharu (1952). He died a few months after the film was released, leaving his audience with a strong motion picture as a closure to a prolific career. The film was a...
- 12/28/2016
- by Thor
- AsianMoviePulse
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor is joined by Scott Nye to discuss Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women.
About the films:
Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions. With Mizoguchi’s visual daring and eloquence, these films are as...
About the films:
Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions. With Mizoguchi’s visual daring and eloquence, these films are as...
- 11/4/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David is joined by Scott Nye to discuss Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women. (Trevor was unable to join in this discussion, but will be back for Part 2 of this series.)
About the films:
Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions.
About the films:
Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions.
- 10/5/2016
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
It should surprise precisely nobody that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne made a single list for Sight & Sound, and it doesn’t strike me as odd that they acted so nonchalant about the effort. Their comments section will say it all: “A random list of ten greatest films.” I do, however, question the extent to which this is “random,” insofar as connections to their oeuvre are concerned, and fellow fans will probably notice commonalities from the word “go.”
All right, yes, The Big Heat doesn’t exactly scream “social realism,” but the concerns shared by many of these pictures — economic and social inequality, for one, as well as the strains they put on romantic and parent-child relationships — rings through the Dardennes’ long career. If Shoah or Modern Times are a bit more dour and comedic (guess which adjective applies to which film) than The Kid with a Bike, they have the qualities of forebears,...
All right, yes, The Big Heat doesn’t exactly scream “social realism,” but the concerns shared by many of these pictures — economic and social inequality, for one, as well as the strains they put on romantic and parent-child relationships — rings through the Dardennes’ long career. If Shoah or Modern Times are a bit more dour and comedic (guess which adjective applies to which film) than The Kid with a Bike, they have the qualities of forebears,...
- 10/19/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
From fizzy drink sizes to video nasties to employment law, we look at the films that had an impact on legislation as well as culture...
Some films appear in the cinema, entertain their audience, make their money, and then dutifully shuffle off into the mists of history, only to be wheeled out now and again on TV. But occasionally, one comes along that has a lasting impact, and every so often, a movie has at least some influence on an eventual change in the law.
Here, we're going to look at a few examples of that, as we examine a selection of films that have had an impact more lasting than how much they made at the box office...
Scum
Originally conceived as a BBC Play For Today, Alan Clarke's Scum was pulled by the corporation from its broadcast schedules. Undeterred, Clarke and writer Roy Minton reworked it as a film,...
Some films appear in the cinema, entertain their audience, make their money, and then dutifully shuffle off into the mists of history, only to be wheeled out now and again on TV. But occasionally, one comes along that has a lasting impact, and every so often, a movie has at least some influence on an eventual change in the law.
Here, we're going to look at a few examples of that, as we examine a selection of films that have had an impact more lasting than how much they made at the box office...
Scum
Originally conceived as a BBC Play For Today, Alan Clarke's Scum was pulled by the corporation from its broadcast schedules. Undeterred, Clarke and writer Roy Minton reworked it as a film,...
- 8/28/2014
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
In some danger of being overlooked in the press of history that reveres Yasujiro Ozu's rigorous constancy and Akira Kurosawa's noble pulp, Kenji Mizoguchi is a more difficult master magician to love and a harder legend to sell. We like our auteurs set in idiosyncratic bronze, and the more consistently they cast stylistic shadows, the more they are lionized by successive generations of cinephiles. Mizoguchi's 33-year career, reaching from the silent era to the rise of global popularity of Japanese cinema in the postwar years, with 1956's Street of Shame, had a subtler, more nuanced trajectory, guided only by his tastefulness, flamboyance-free humanism, and belief in the expressive force of the moving camera and the resonance of deep compositions.
That is to say, gliding...
That is to say, gliding...
- 4/30/2014
- Village Voice
After remastering Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff earlier this year for Blu-ray, Criterion unleashes another of the auteur’s trio of early 50’s Venice prize winners with 1952’s The Life of Oharu, a classic tragedy exemplifying the director’s favorite theme, the plight of woman in a world cruelly controlled by men. While Sansho has enjoyed a considerable reputation in the annals of cinema, Mizoguchi openly criticized the studio interference that hobbled his original intentions, instead he often citing this earlier title as his greatest achievement. Considering it was made without sufficient funding and filmed in a warehouse instead of sound stage that necessitated filming be halted frequently due to passing trains, it’s fascinating to see the auteur, infamous for his meticulous, uninterrupted takes, succeed so gloriously in form and content here.
Opening on a dark, rainy night, we meet the aged Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), a prostitute commiserating with...
Opening on a dark, rainy night, we meet the aged Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), a prostitute commiserating with...
- 7/9/2013
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
While less known than his equally revered contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, the filmography of Kenji Mizoguchi may arguably be the more successfully varied. Criterion remasters his 1954 title, Sansho the Bailiff for Blu-ray this month, one of the auteur’s most celebrated works, and one that ends his three year succession of winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival (he also won for The Life of Oharu in 1952 and Ugetsu in 1953). This was his eighty-first feature film, and he would make only five more features due to his death in 1956. While this is considered one of his top works, Mizoguchi apparently didn’t think the same, citing studio interference in not being able to make the film he had set out to create. Despite its powerfully resonant emotional content, there does seem to be an odd struggle at work in regards to the focus of the film,...
- 2/26/2013
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
There was plenty of discussion across the movie blogosphere following last week's announcement that Vertigo had dethroned Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time according to Sight & Sound's decennial poll. In addition to revealing the top 50 as determined by critics, they also provided a top 10 based on a separate poll for directors only. In the print version of the magazine, they have taken it a step further by reprinting some of the individual top 10 lists from the filmmakers who participated, and we now have some of them here for your perusal. Among them, we have lists from legends like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino, but there are also some unexpected newcomers who took part including Richard Ayoade (Submarine), Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) and Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene). Some of these lists aren't all that surprising (both Quentin Tarantino...
- 8/6/2012
- by Sean
- FilmJunk
I recently watched a short documentary by Andrea Marks called Freedom on the Fence. Made in 2009, and only 40 minutes long, it is a nice introduction to the world of Polish movie posters which concisely explains the particular set of circumstances that gave rise to the incredible flowering of creativity that was the Polish poster of the 1950s and 60s. An audio interview with Henryk Tomaszewski, the father of the modern Polish poster, explains how the systematic destruction of Warsaw by the retreating Nazis in 1945, which left 80% of the city in ruins, gave rise to a landscape of rubble and fences which basically created an open-air art gallery for posters.
At the same time, at the end of the war, there was a six year backlog of American and other foreign cinema that was waiting to be seen in Poland. Tomaszewski remembers being told by the woman in charge of film...
At the same time, at the end of the war, there was a six year backlog of American and other foreign cinema that was waiting to be seen in Poland. Tomaszewski remembers being told by the woman in charge of film...
- 7/5/2012
- MUBI
Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano
Directed by Hisayasu Sato
Written by Naoko Nishida based on the book by Atsuhiko Nakamura
Japan, 2010
Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano is perhaps the most heartfelt pornography film you will see this year. Blending the tragic personal lives of two young women, Lulu & Ayano, who respectively turn to porn to feel wanted and to survive. The film plays on comic notes but is largely focused on the overlying drama and horror of the Japanese porn industry, which exploits and abuses young women. It presents the industry as selling out it’s stars to the highest bidder at the expense of their personal volition. The women in particular, dreading the hyper-violent “rape scene”, which is as dirty and violent as it sounds.
The act of selling sex is not the issue of the hand (if it were, I’d take some objection to the film, which is still...
Directed by Hisayasu Sato
Written by Naoko Nishida based on the book by Atsuhiko Nakamura
Japan, 2010
Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano is perhaps the most heartfelt pornography film you will see this year. Blending the tragic personal lives of two young women, Lulu & Ayano, who respectively turn to porn to feel wanted and to survive. The film plays on comic notes but is largely focused on the overlying drama and horror of the Japanese porn industry, which exploits and abuses young women. It presents the industry as selling out it’s stars to the highest bidder at the expense of their personal volition. The women in particular, dreading the hyper-violent “rape scene”, which is as dirty and violent as it sounds.
The act of selling sex is not the issue of the hand (if it were, I’d take some objection to the film, which is still...
- 7/29/2011
- by Justine
- SoundOnSight
A little late this week, mainly because of my own random b.s. that one goes through when attempting to juggle too many things at once. Try not to do it kids, because it means a Hulu article gets sidetracked a bit. A ton of stuff was added since I last was here, but unlike last week’s where I focused on 10 specific films that weren’t in the Collection, this time it’s a bunch of familiar (and not so) faces, be it in their great Eclipse sets or in Criterion’s own pantheon.
A huge thanks to who have already used this link to enjoy their own Hulu Plus and in turn keeping this series of articles up and running. We can always use the help, so please sign up using that specific link. Every little bit does keep this nice and polished. But enough about that. You...
A huge thanks to who have already used this link to enjoy their own Hulu Plus and in turn keeping this series of articles up and running. We can always use the help, so please sign up using that specific link. Every little bit does keep this nice and polished. But enough about that. You...
- 5/28/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
Starting today, and for most of April, Film Forum in New York will be honoring five of Japan’s greatest actresses in a portmanteau retrospective entitled 5 Japanese Divas. The divas in question are Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo and Hideko Takamine who, collectively, starred in some of the greatest Japanese films of the 1950s golden age (there are more masterpieces per square foot in this retrospective than in any other theater in town). Takamine died last December at the age of 86 (and was featured on Movie Poster of the Week earlier this year), but, remarkably, three of these goddesses—Kyo, Hara and Yamada—are still with us, aged 87, 90 and 94 respectively.
I love the Japanese posters of the 1950s with their crowded montages of faces (I can never be sure if they are photographs or hyper-realist illustrations) in which the actors are paramount, more because I love the...
I love the Japanese posters of the 1950s with their crowded montages of faces (I can never be sure if they are photographs or hyper-realist illustrations) in which the actors are paramount, more because I love the...
- 4/1/2011
- MUBI
Japanese cinema isn’t all Takeshi Miike, Battle Royale, Takeshi Kitano and Akira Kurosawa you know. Director Kenji Mizoguchi took a more poetic and no less masterful approach to his work which is being celebrated in an amazing boxset collection released by Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label from 23rd January focusing on the man’s 1950s classic-after-classic output.
We’ve been sent over a press release with details of what films feature and what extra features there are. FilmShaft’s Alex Wagner is a big Mizoguchi fan, so imagine he’s excited by this news! So if you’re a connoisseur of Japanese film or a film student wanting to look good in class by saying something like, “well Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame is largely considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films of the 20th century”, this boxset is definitely for you.
Eureka! have...
We’ve been sent over a press release with details of what films feature and what extra features there are. FilmShaft’s Alex Wagner is a big Mizoguchi fan, so imagine he’s excited by this news! So if you’re a connoisseur of Japanese film or a film student wanting to look good in class by saying something like, “well Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame is largely considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films of the 20th century”, this boxset is definitely for you.
Eureka! have...
- 1/5/2011
- by Martyn Conterio
- FilmShaft.com
Though I won’t assume anyone took special notice of the fact, I took last Monday off from writing a new installment in this weekly column of Eclipse film reviews. Reason being that I took my family on a ten-day vacation to California, specifically San Francisco and the north coast of that state up toward Mendocino. So since I’m just back from a nice long stretch of traveling, it seems like a road movie is in order, and I found just the right offering, Mr. Thank You, from Eclipse Series 15: Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu. Through no fault of his own, this set of Depression-era films from the little-known director Shimizu is probably one of the most obscure sets featured so far in the entire run of Eclipse boxes, but he’s a perfect example for what makes this line of DVDs so engaging and essential (hey, he even directed a film titled Eclipse,...
- 8/23/2010
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
This is the podcast dedicated to The Criterion Collection. Rudie Obias, Ryan Gallagher & James McCormick discuss Criterion News & Rumors and Criterion New Releases, they also analyze, discuss & highlight Cc #512, Jean-Luc Godard film, Vivre Sa Vie.
What do you think of their show? Please send them your feed back: CriterionCast@gmail.com or call their voicemail line @ 347.878.3430 or follow them on twitter @CriterionCast or Comment on their blog, http://CriterionCast.com.
Thank you for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to their podcast and please leave your reviews in their itunes feed.
They broadcast every episode Live on UStream every Friday @ 7pm Est/4pm Pst. Join in on the conversation @ CriterionCast.com/Live
Our next episode they will highlight and discuss Criterion #496 Steven Soderbergh’s film, Che.
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Show Notes:
(00:00 – 00:15; “A United Theory” by God Help The Girl)
(00:16 – 01:...
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Our next episode they will highlight and discuss Criterion #496 Steven Soderbergh’s film, Che.
Add It To Your Netflix Queue & Available Via Watch Instantly..
Show Notes:
(00:00 – 00:15; “A United Theory” by God Help The Girl)
(00:16 – 01:...
- 8/3/2010
- by Rudie Obias
- CriterionCast
I’ll live to see what becomes of a prostitute. I’ll see it for myself.
After a pair of columns over the past two weeks dedicated to the early and later films of Yasujiro Ozu, and an earlier review of Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, it seems only fitting that my attention should turn toward the last of classic Japanese cinema’s “Big Three” directors. As was the case last Monday with Early Spring, today’s selection happens to fit right into my on-going project of reviewing Criterion films in chronological order. It’s Street of Shame, from Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women, which also turns out to be the last film that Mizoguchi ever made (and the only film I’ve watched so far from this set, which I recently purchased during Barnes & Noble’s 50% off sale)
This set is somewhat unique in...
After a pair of columns over the past two weeks dedicated to the early and later films of Yasujiro Ozu, and an earlier review of Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, it seems only fitting that my attention should turn toward the last of classic Japanese cinema’s “Big Three” directors. As was the case last Monday with Early Spring, today’s selection happens to fit right into my on-going project of reviewing Criterion films in chronological order. It’s Street of Shame, from Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women, which also turns out to be the last film that Mizoguchi ever made (and the only film I’ve watched so far from this set, which I recently purchased during Barnes & Noble’s 50% off sale)
This set is somewhat unique in...
- 8/2/2010
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
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