The Criterion Collection

The teeming talent and copious output of Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima may have resulted in a body of work that’s stylistically mercurial, but his thematic preoccupations have been steadfast: they are, as Dennis Lim points out in a Los Angeles Times review of the new Eclipse set Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties, “sex, violence and the two as conjoined forces.” That being the case, it’s somewhat surprising how little known most of his films are outside his own country. “He has been far less prolific since the early 1970s, and his international reputation has gone into partial eclipse,” Lim explains—invoking both the name and the raison d’être of the line that this collection of some of Oshima’s least seen, most entertaining films is part of. The set is, as Lim puts it, “an essential corrective.”

And the controversial director does seem to be back in the conversation in a big way. Film Comment deems Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties to be “one of the year’s most significant releases,” and considers that “by presenting the work of Oshima and, earlier this year, Chantal Akerman to new audiences, Criterion’s Eclipse label has already equaled the achievements of its more renowned parent.” For IFC Films, Michael Atkinson arrives at the colorful conclusion that “the new Criterion Eclipse set of five rarely seen ’60s films comes off as a set of cherry bombs tossed down our film-culture toilets . . . Even in the context of the other crazy New Wavers—Suzuki, Imamura, Masumura, and so on—who were all vividly enthusiastic about critiquing postwar Japan as a dog pit of whores and lunatics, Oshima was a nose-thumber without parallel.”

The New York Times’ Dave Kehr calls the films in the set “fascinating,” and believes that “among the Japanese directors who came of age after World War II, Nagisa Oshima is perhaps the most provocative.” And Lim ends his piece with this persuasive thought: “Oshima once said that the goal of his films was ‘to force the Japanese to look in the mirror.’ That may make them sound narrow in intent. But it is precisely this confrontational impulse, and this belief that cinema can have a real-world impact, that make his movies universal, and as urgent and important as ever.”