A Journey to the Center of Cinematic Madness

Essentially Kaneto Shindo's The Naked Island (1960) is a simple film. It depicts the hardships of a family living on a small and isolate...

Yasujiro Ozu's Passing Fancy (1933) is a slight inferior film from the director's silent era. Takeshi Sakamoto plays an unresponsibl...

( image source ) Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But ... (1932) is often called the masterpiece of Ozu's silent era and I agree with that...

( image source ) Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Chorus (1931) is the film that (as David Bordwell said) was the important turning point for the di...

( image source ) Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Twilight (1957) is probably the darkest film the director ever made. The familiar explorations of ...

( image source ) Masaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion (1967) is a spiritual sequel to Harakiri (1964) : Kobayashi's critique of auth...

( image source ) Yasujiro Ozu's Early Summer (1951) is yet another observation of family and marriage in post-war Japan for the director...

Even though Mikio Naruse's Flowing (1956) tells about the geisha tradition in post-war Japan the audience is never shown scenes of the a...

In Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954) Setsuko Hara plays a housewife whose husband cheats on her. She faces an insurmountable d...

Hsiao-hsien Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) reminds me of the director's earlier film, Café Lumière (2003), because in both f...

Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009) is the second part of a movie series that attemps to retell the story of Hideaki Anno's Neon...

I reviewed Sion Sono's Love Exposure (2009) last December after I had seen it for the first time. I finally decided to rewatch the epic...

Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums (1954) is a film about 3 former geishas who try to cope with monetary and family issues. Weirdly enou...

It has only been 3 months since I last reviewed Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2003) , but I decided to watch it again to see its chronolog...

( image source ) John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is considered one of the most important (and best) films of the western genre. After s...

Whoa. Just whoa. Mamoru Hosada restored my faith in the future of anime industry with his latest film, Summer Wars (2009). The plot synopsis...

Edward Yang's Yi yi (2000) is a film that moves me unlike any other: it can be said that the movie tells in a nutshell what it means to ...

Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949) is the first part of an unofficial "Noriko trilogy" (3 Ozu films which have a character call...

( image source ) If you had asked me a year ago whether I'm a Kim Ki-duk fan or not, I would have replied 'yes'. Even films like...

( image source ) Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) is a three-hour film divided into two parts which in turn depict the title charac...