The Criterion Collection

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Nagisa Oshima’s infamous, hard-core In the Realm of the Senses and savage ghost story Empire of Passion is just how elegant they are, a couple of critics have noted in their reviews of our special edition DVDs. The former, writes Dennis Demody in Paper, was “a scandal at the time, but it is also an artistic triumph”; and he calls the latter film an “eerily beautiful tale that plays like The Postman Always Rings Twice meets The Ring.” Similarly, in the New York Times, Dave Kehr was struck by how the notorious In the Realm of the Senses plays as “a handsomely designed period piece,” by the way “this profoundly anarchic film is as tightly controlled and precisely calibrated as a tea ceremony.” But Dennis Lim, in the Los Angeles Times, reminds us that this “landmark . . . retains its power to provoke.”