Tag: JAPAN

August 31, 2019 / Drama
August 25, 2019 / Documentary

Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.

August 18, 2019 / Experimental

——UPGRADED——

Shûji Terayama’s debut feature Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, an adaptation of his eponymous novel and play, is a playful, energetic, psychedelic, visually hypnotic critique of contemporary Japanese society’s descent into ruthless materialism. The story focuses on a teenager in hopeless search of identity within a highly dysfunctional family and a fractured world that both threaten to devour the boy—demanding everything and not really caring at all. A masterpiece of subversive cinema.

August 18, 2019 / Drama
August 5, 2019 / Mystery
August 5, 2019 / Drama

This gripping docudrama is a fictionalized account of what could happen to a Japanese family when one of their sons shames them in front of the entire nation. Director Masaki Kobayashi has used real events so the dramatic turns in the film are based on fact — a 1970s shootout in the mountains between a band of Japanese terrorists and the police in which many men on both sides died.

August 2, 2019 / Sci-Fi

When American reporter Steve Martin investigates a series of mysterious disasters off the coast of Japan, he comes face to face with an ancient creature so powerful and so terrifying, it can reduce Tokyo to a smoldering graveyard. Nuclear weapon testing resurrected this relic from the Jurassic age, and now it’s rampaging across Japan. At night, Godzilla wades through Tokyo leaving death and destruction in his wake, disappearing into Tokyo Bay when his rage subsides. But which disaster is worse, Godzilla’s fury, of the death of Tokyo Bay?

July 26, 2019 / Arthouse