Barbara Scharres

That Hard Boiled would be action director John Woo’s last film made in Hong Kong before his emigration to the U.S. in 1992 resonates throughout the picture. While he may shoot in Hong Kong again, Woo will never again make a film like this, conceive

Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial pro

Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with Osaka Elegy. Boldly critiquing the position of women in contemporary Japanese society, the film examines a young woman’s victimization and desce