As the great military commander Hideyoshi was consolidating his power across Japan, one of his actions was to wipe out a clan of assassins, killing every man, woman and child he found in the village. Years later, one of the survivors has hired a young but skilled assassin to avenge the deaths of his friends and family. His mission: to sneak into the most heavily guarded castle in Japan, and kill the supreme ruler of the country.Read More »
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A woman brings her injured daughter to the hospital, only to realize that the doctor is the estranged father of her child. Directed by Masahiro Shinoda.Read More »
Famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi follows a dying man’s words to an enigmatic island, where he meets beautiful twin sisters and tragic events unfold.Read More »
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A Japanese soldier Tsutomu Yamazki deserts his position and travels to a small town on the Sea of Japan to start over in this melodrama from director Shinoda Masahiro. When a young maid falls for him, he talks her into sleeping with an older man for money. The woman is told by a Geisha Mayumi Ogawa that she gave up her virginity cheaply. The resort town begins to feel the influence of the modern world as the sabre-rattling that preceded World War II begins to change their lives forever. ~ Dan Pavlides, RoviRead More »
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Outside of a small village in Japan, a mysterious pond is inhabited by mythic creatures. Their story is of revenge, tragedy, and the power of real love. A classical tale which translates wonderfully to film.Read More »
Mod-sixties visuals and black humor mark this wild New Wave masterpiece about a vengeful contractor who hires a series of young killers to target a woman muckraker. Trouble brews when an amateur marksman shows up his eclectic competition. Directed from a script by Shuji Terayama, Shinoda’s colorful showcase of action (and unexpected song!) has been compared to a pastiche of Pierrot le Fou and Kubrick’s The Killing. —NYFF 2010Read More »
A lancer falls into disgrace when his social ambitions lead him to become engaged to two different women.
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LEAD: Don’t be put off by the title. ”Gonza the Spearman” is not an Eastern western. Masahiro Shinoda’s stately work, which opens the Public Theater’s Autumn in Japan series today, has few duels and only a gout or two of blood. Instead, it is filled with historical imagination, social comment and restrained passion, along with scene after elegantly composed scene of a culture that seems to have been paralyzed in a spare beauty.Read More »
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Two Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and to locate their mentor.Read More »
Continuing the Setouchi trilogy — which began with 1984’s MacArthur’s Children — this film looks at Japan just after World War II. The film opens with documentary footage of the 1995 Hanshin earthquake that flattened Kobe. The devastation reminds an elderly Keita Onda of the ruined landscape of Kobe just after the Allied bombing raids, which he witnessed from his home on nearby Awajishima Island. Cut to 1945, when Keita’s father, Kokichi (Kyozo Nagatsuka), receives the ashes of his eldest son who died on the battlefield. A rigid traditionalist, Kokichi decides to follow custom and return the ashes to his son’s birthplace in Kyushu. He hires out a car — a lavish expense that has the neighbors’ tongues wagging about a possible mass suicide. Instead, the family — consisting of the father, the mother Fuji (played by Shinoda’s wife, Shima Iwashita), Keita (Hideyuki Kasahara), daughter Hideko (Sayuri Kawachi), and teenaged son Koji (Jun Toba) — end up on a ferry bound for the south of Japan. Koji and his father are locked in a battle of wills. While dad preaches the value of tradition, Koji is much more interested in all things American. As the film progresses, Koji falls for a beautiful war-orphan named Yukiko (Hinano Yoshikawa). Also featured in this film are side stories about other passengers on the boat, including a sweet-talking black marketer who enlightens Kokichi on the joys of foreign liquor, a drug-addled soldier who falls in love with an impoverished woman about to turn tricks just to eat, and a dapper middle-aged man who jumps from the boat.Read More »