Soon after the disparate yet compatible Naoya and Katsuhiro start to settle into a relationship, a slightly unhinged young woman named Asako asks Katsuhiro to father her child. While the couple navigate the implications of this unexpected proposal, they are forced to confront their conflicting understandings of what it means to be gay and in a committed relationship. A landmark work of LGBTQ Japanese cinema by pioneering director Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Hush! humorously and poignantly upends the traditional Japanese genre of the family drama to offer a deeply human story about three people doing their best to be true to themselves.
Tag: 2000s
Eleven-year-old Frankie Dollar is the leader of an Aboriginal dance group, the Djarn Djarns. Theyr̉e in big demand today at the Cultural Centre, but Frankies̉ really in the doldrums because one year ago, to the day, his father died. Now he needs his friends more than ever.
A documentarian sets about to expose the objectification of sex workers at a brothel, only to find her own sexual desires awakening.
In her brother’s apartment where he died, Yuki finds a vacuum cleaner with its cord still hooked up to the outlet. She discovers that the circumstances surrounding her brother’s supposed suicide are sketchy at best, yet no one has any answers. When she starts having hallucinations involving his ghost, however, she seeks some psychological help, eventually uncovering some things that she may have wished she’d left covered.
A thoughtful and emotionally challenging look at the lives of two children living in modern day Afghanistan, STRAY DOGS lifts the lid on what it is like living in the country, post-Taliban. The film focuses on a young brother and sister who are forced to share their incarcerated mother’s prison cell by night, but roam the streets during the day. For they are homeless; only allowed to stay within the prison’s confines after dark, the children are not permitted there during the day. Fed up with having to fend for themselves, and in a desperate bid to get locked up on a more permanent basis, the siblings concoct a cunning plan; using American cinema as a guide, they begin to perform robberies on the streets of Kabul.
Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore reunite in their first acting performance together since “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (1961-66), the classic comedy series for which both stars earned multiple Emmy Awards. This powerfully bittersweet comedy follows the relationship that develops between nursing home residents Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin during a series of gin games in which their ailments, misfortunes and losses are exposed in funny, honest and increasingly heated moments.
The hero is Toshio Kanbe, a middle-aged salaryman with a typical family (wife, two teenage children), living quietly in a provincial city (Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture), who wakes up one morning in the summer of 1994 to find himself the prime suspect in the biggest mass-murder case of the decade. Someone, somehow, released clouds of poison gas that killed seven and sickened nearly 600 people in his apartment building and neighborhood.
In its sixty-five minutes, Paz Encina’s first film, carries Ramón and Cándida, an aging couple living in the deep country, from sunrise, when they hang their old hammock between two trees in a clearing, to sunset, when they take it in. Settled in its tenuous grasp, they talk about the heat, the rain, the dog that won’t stop barking, the war, and their son, Máximo, who is doing his military service and hasn’t been heard from lately. The father lives in hope, the mother in fear, and scenes of their daily rounds of labor and rest—images of a contemplative pictorial exaltation—are joined by voice-over flashbacks revealing the story of their son’s departure and the rumors that followed.