Tokyo

Jul 9, 2017 — A veteran of Japan’s legendary Shochiku studios, the versatile genre auteur Yoshitaro Nomura made his mark with a string of impeccably constructed thrillers. Five of his best are now available to stream on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Jul 9, 2017 — New York. “It’s Great to Be Alive may not be the nuttiest Hollywood musical of 1933—a year that brought the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup—but it’s surely the only one to end with a production number in which the women of...

Jun 1, 2017 — Earlier this spring, Ryuichi Sakamoto gave an exquisitely intimate concert at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Surrounded by a small audience in the venue’s opulent Veterans Room, the renowned Japanese composer was positioned in the center of the...

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 25, 2017 — “Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, our favorite director of B movies that look like art films (or are they the other way around?), to upturn the nostalgia for American blockbusters of the 1980s,” begins Daniel Kasman in the Notebook. “Japan’s...

May 22, 2017 — A portrait of childhood, domestic life, and consumerism in postwar suburban Tokyo, Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning is one of the Japanese master’s most charming and subtly incisive comedies. Made in 1959, this loose update of the director’s own 1932 silent...

Apr 25, 2017 — When it comes to capturing the sensory pleasures of food on film, it’s hard to beat Juzo Itami’s mouthwatering 1985 “ramen western” Tampopo. A mix of wicked humor and surreal eroticism, this culinary odyssey follows a widowed noodle-shop owner and...

Apr 4, 2017 — Through an alchemy of stylistic flair and creative restlessness, Seijun Suzuki was able to transcend the by-the-numbers material he was assigned as a director at Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu, to become one of the most electrifying genre auteurs of...

Nov 8, 2016 — This adaptation of one of the most influential series in manga history is a delirious mix of breathtaking swordplay and pop vulgarity.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.