Aug 4, 2003 — Shohei Imamura’s lurid black comedy showcases the director’s passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture.

Jan 15, 2026 — SXSW and Slamdance unveil full lineups, and the Berlinale fills out its Forum, Panorama, Generation, and Classics programs.

May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

May 20, 2009 — Early in Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder, the librarian Riichi distractedly peruses Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization while conversing with his clinging mistress, Yoshiko. One can read the reference in many ways: as a glancing jest, as an (uncharacteristic) Imamurian...

Aug 26, 2014 — Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at...

Apr 17, 2026 — So many Hamlets! Plus Radley Metzger, Marco Bellocchio, and Tilda Swinton and Orbital.