This film, based on the novel by Arthur Golden, unfolds from the perspective of Chiyo (Zhang Ziyi), a girl who, at the age of nine, is sold to a geisha house in Kyoto in the early 1930s. Here, she learns that becoming a geisha can be the single path to wealth and independence for a woman. The head geisha of her house, however, Hatsumomo (Gong Li), ...
Reminiscent of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom (1992), this romantic comedy from Japan was a hit in its country of origin, despite (or perhaps because of) its tacit criticisms of the restrictive aspects of Japanese culture. Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) is a typically strait-laced Japanese businessmen who, passing by in his commuter train ...
The sophomore directorial effort from ill-fated Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami, Tampopo is an off-beat comedy featuring several intersecting stories all related to food. Tsutomu Yamazaki plays Goro, a truck driver who helps a young widow named Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) improve her noodle restaurant. Over the course of the film, the story drifts ...
The tragic aftermath of human carelessness travels around the world in this multi-narrative drama from filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett) are a couple from the United States who have traveled to Morocco in Northern Africa on a vacation after the death of one of their children has sent Susan into a ...
Yuka (Hiromi Nagasaku) is an attractive young woman whose brother has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Shortly before his untimely death, Yuka got her first glimpse of his double, who has since moved into their apartment and taken his place. Hayasaki (Koji Yakusho) is a brilliant but mercurial scientist obsessed with perfecting a ...
Idiosyncratic auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed this bizarre allegorical tale about a tree named Charisma. Goro Yabuike (Koji Yakusho) is a burned-out hostage negotiator called to rescue an MP from a gun-toting lunatic demanding that "rule of the world" be restored. In a moment of indecision, he fails to act; as a result, both the MP and the ...
In 1998, Japanese auteur Shohei Imamura announced his retirement with his wild and wooly war drama Kanzo Sensei. His announcement clearly proved to be premature, as exhibited by this bizarre romantic drama about the power of really good sex, based on a book by Henmi Yo. Koji Yakusho -- who starred in Imamura's Unagi along with virtually every ...
The Sixth Sense and A Simple Plan by way of Martin Heidegger, this genre-bending thriller is directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Katsuhiko (Koji Yakusho) is a mild-mannered sound-technician who is married to Junco (Jun Fubuki). While at first glance Junco seems to be an average hausfrau, she possesses great clairvoyant powers. Though she has slowly and ...
As the Japanese studios were declining in 1969, four legendary directors from that country's "golden age" of cinema -- Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and of course Akira Kurosawa -- banded together to start their own production company. The financial and critical failure of the studio's first feature, Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-Den ...
Veteran filmmaker and perennial iconoclast Shohei Imamura directs this darkly comic tale about love, redemption, and a man's beloved pet eel. The film opens with Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho), a seemingly normal salaryman, learning that his wife might be having an affair. When he catches the couple in flaganto delicto , he freaks out and ...
Veteran director Yoshimitsu Morita spins this romantic melodrama that was originally written by Junichi Watanabe and serialized in the Nihon Keizai Shinbum, Japan's answer to the Wall Street Journal. Kuki (Koji Yakusho) is a former magazine editor wunderkind whose star has dimmed as he slides into middle age. After corporate downsizing, he finds ...
Francois Girard's adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's novel Silk stars Michael Pitt as a young Frenchman who travels to Japan at the request of a wealthy silkworm magnate who asks him to smuggle back some new worms. The mission succeeds, and this allows the man to live in great comfort with his wife (Keira Knightley). After a few years, they are ...
Oddball Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed this haunting police thriller about murder, mind control, and the power of charisma. Police Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is tracking a series of bizarre murders, all committed in exactly the same manner: a giant X is slashed in the flesh of the victims. But that's where the similarities end. ...
Japanese horror producer Taka Ichise -- the force behind Ringu and Ju-on: The Grudge -- and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Pulse, team up for the supernatural horror picture Retribution (aka Sakebi), starring Koji Yakusho, Riona Hazuki, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Manami Konishi, Ryo Kase, Hiroyuki Hirayama, and Jô Odagiri. Yakusho plays Yoshioka, a cop ...
One of the leading voices in the new Japanese cinema, Shinji Aoyama directs this saga about memory, grief, and redemption. Shot in stark black and white, the film opens with the sudden and inexplicably bloody hijacking of a bus in rural Kyushu. The crazed gunman (Riju Go) shoots two passengers in the back as they try to flee. Stepping out of the ...
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