Feb 22, 1999 — Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the ’60s. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Joe Shishido. The director: Seijun Suzuki. I was not at...

Jan 10, 2017 — Mass culture is the subject of both celebration and critique in our latest Short + Feature, premiering today on the Criterion Channel. This week’s program highlights two French films that satirize the ubiquity of consumerism: Jean Luc Godard’s inventively free-form...

Dec 20, 2012 — The Los Angeles–based music producer Flying Lotus (born Steve Ellison) has been working in the electronic music field since the early 2000s. Well known for producing the bumper music for Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, he has also collaborated with...

The director of Cowboy Bebop shares his love for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and how John Cassavetes blurred the line between fictional drama and realism, talks about what makes Branded to Kill a mesmerizing masterpiece, and finds inspiration...

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

Feb 24, 2017 — Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of...

Oct 16, 2025 — This month, join us for a Thanksgiving feast of some of the movies’ most memorable family reunions, or delve into the dark alleyways of noir mysteries built around protagonists tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts.

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Apr 20, 2023 — This month’s highlights include tributes to Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seijun Suzuki and a collection of Asian American films from the 1980s.

Aug 9, 2022 — An indie pioneer whose life was cut tragically short, the Texas filmmaker found grace in the tedium of repressive small-town existence.