focus on Japanese language films
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Cafe Lumiere
$16.95 | 104 minutes
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of China's greatest filmmakers, honors the memory of the great Yasujiro Ozu in the beautiful CAFÉ LUMIERE. Like Ozu, Hou tries to capture honesty and reality in the film, which stars pop idol Yo Hitoto as Yoko, a young woman who makes her way through life almost casually, not letting anything get her too upset&hellip…
Cops Vs. Thugs
$11.95 | 100 minutes
Kinji Fukasawa (BATTLE ROYALE) directs this gritty yakuza tale, set in Kurashima City in the 1960s. An effort by the police to clean up the streets has resulted in a tenuous peace, but when the leader of the Ohara gang lands in prison, the rival Kawade gang decides to strike. The temporary leader of the Ohara family calls upon a childhood&hellip…
Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi)
$34.95 | 98 minutes
In this classic film noir, set in postwar Japan, Toshirô Mifune plays Matsunaga, a tough small-time gangster who takes a bullet during a fight in the slums of Tokyo. He makes his way to the office of Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a disillusioned yet passionate doctor, who treats the wound and, in the process, discovers Matsunaga has&hellip…
Gate of Flesh
$25.95 | 90 minutes
A group of five women occupy a bombed out building, turning it into a house of prostitution where the women are both the business operators and the working girls. Attempting to ensure an orderly business and home, many ground rules are set, including the strict clause of no sex without receiving payment. When the roommates shelter a wayward&hellip…
Harakiri
$34.95 | 133 minutes
Set in 17th-century Japan, director Makaki Kobayahi's HARAKIRI stars Tatsuya Nakadai (RAN) as masterless samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo. Structured in a series of flashbacks, the film opens in a period of serenity that has brought about a consolidation of power in Japan, resulting in the release of many samurai from their feudal obligations&hellip…
Last Life in the Universe
$19.95 | 104 minutes
Shy Kenji is a Japanese librarian in Bangkok who lives within a neatly organized world and fantasizes about committing suicide, but gets interrupted every time he attempts to end his life. While at work, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful girl he spots through the bookshelves. Later, while attempting to jump off a bridge, he watches&hellip…
Late Ozu
$60.95 | 636 minutes
Yasujiro Ozu ranks, along with Kurosawa, as one of Japan's greatest film directors. His towering masterpiece, TOKYO STORY, is considered by many to be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made. The film was released in 1953, over two decades after Ozu's directorial debut. TOKYO STORY therefore, represents a watershed moment in the&hellip…
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
$34.95 | 120 minutes
Paul Schrader's visually stunning, collagelike portrait of acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted an impossible harmony between self, art, and society. Taking place on Mishima's last day, when he famously committed public seppuku&hellip…
Patriotism (Yûkoku)
$21.95 | 27 minutes
Playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima foreshadowed his own violent suicide with this ravishing short feature, his only foray into filmmaking, yet made with the expressiveness and confidence of a true cinema artist. All prints of Patriotism (Y'koku), which depicts the seppuku of a army officer, were destroyed after Mishima's death in 1970&hellip…
Pulse
$16.95 | 118 minutes
"Would you like to meet a ghost?" This foreboding question is posed to a young man by his own computer, suddenly able to dial up to the Internet--by itself. Unfortunately for the characters in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE, inquisitive PCs are the least of their problems. What begins as the seemingly isolated suicide of a computer hacker in&hellip…