The Criterion Collection
Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.
Apr 10, 2013 — Teinosuke Kinugasa’s landmark color film is a visual feast that has finally been vibrantly restored.
Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.
Essays
Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.
Essays
Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...
Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.
Oct 17, 2011 — Scratch the surface of a contemporary J-horror classic like Ringu (1998) or any of the Ju-on films (2000–03) and you’ll glimpse Yabu no naka no kuroneko (Black Cat from the Grove), released in the U.S. as simply Kuroneko (1968). Shot...
Jun 10, 2011 — Bringing Junichiro Tanizaki’s sprawling, elegiac historical novel The Makioka Sisters (1948) to the screen would seem an undertaking tailor-made for Kon Ichikawa. The renowned writer’s work was familiar territory for the veteran director, who had adapted the quirky Tanizaki novella...
May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...
Apr 30, 2009 — The following article, based on an interview with Nagisa Oshima conducted by Katsue Tomiyama in April 1983, first appeared, in slightly longer form, in the Japanese magazine Image Forum. Tomiyama is a film producer and cofounder of Image Forum, and...