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Due to Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi's directorial prowess within the samurai genre, crafting a list of the greatest samurai films of all time is essentially just assembling the best works by Kurosawa and Kobayashi. Nine of the 32 films Kurosawa directed were within the samurai genre and each of the nine is iconic enough to qualify as one of the genre's very best. Kobayashi's two seminal samurai movies, Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion, are also undeniable masterworks of the genre that arguably belong among the top five samurai movies ever made.

While Kurosawa and Kobayashi's samurai films are more well-known to Western audiences, the samurai genre has a plethora of other brilliant movies that are formative works of Japanese cinema. Auteurs such as Hiroshi Inagaki, Hideo Gosha, Kihachi Okamoto, and Kenji Misumi played an equally important role in the development of the samurai genre as Kurosawa and Kobayashi. Films such as The Sword of Doom,...

The swan song of the series is a whole other animal, since Meiko Kaji has a distinctly secondary role as Ruriko while the social commentary of the rest of the movies has given its place to intense action, which frequently feels and looks a bit too much like a western.

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The story begins literally in the bushes, where Ruriko and her boyfriend Ryumei attempt to have sex in hiding. Unfortunately, even before they have taken off their clothes, a biker gang headed by The President appears and beats them up, despite the latter’s effort to resist. However, Ryumei manages to stab one of them to death, before the gang takes him with them after the instructions of a yakuza, who even proceeds in putting the murder weapon in Ruriko’s hands. The unconscious girl is arrested and sent to prison; however, after her release a few months later,...

Director: Isao Takahata; Screenwriter: Isao Takahata, Riko Sakaguchi; Starring: Aki Asakura, Kengo Kora, Takeo Chii, Nobuko Miyamoto; Running time: 137 mins; Certificate: U

Isao Takahata makes his directorial comeback with The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, his first film for Studio Ghibli since 1999's My Neighbours the Yamadas. The man behind the brilliant, emotionally-devastating Grave of the Fireflies may be in his late 70s, but on this evidence he's still able to conjure up a memorable yarn.

Based on an old Japanese folktale, it centres on a kindly wood cutter who stumbles across a tiny girl living in a bamboo shoot. Taken in by the man and his wife, she's named Princess but earns the moniker Little Bamboo from other children in the village due to her ability to magically grow at speed.

When her adopted father finds gold the family uproot to a mansion in the city and a life...

Tim here. Year-end listmaking mania tends to skip right by animation, with only a glance in the direction of a solitary film that doesn’t tend to reveal much imagination on the part of the listmakers (probably, if you are a critic in 2014, your favorite animated feature was The Lego Movie, unless it was The Lego Movie. But I hear some folks really liked The Lego Movie). The Annie Awards do what they can, but they’re weirdly over-politicized.

All of which is to say, it’s the perfect time, before 2015 has a chance to warm up, to throw a little more light on animated film in the year that was than just rubber-stamping a Best Animated Feature award and moving on. May I present to you this unranked list of

Six Great Vocal Performances from 2014

Alison Brie as “Princess Unikitty”, The Lego Movie

Yes, the exact same Lego Movie...

The Tale Of Princess Kaguya Gkids Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes. Grade:    B+ Director:  Isao Takahata Screenwriter:  Isao Takahata Cast:  Dubbed version: Chloë Grace Moretz, James Caan, Mary Steenburgen, Darren Criss, Lucy Liu, Beau Bridges, James Marsden, Oliver Platt, Dean Cain. Subtitled version: Aki Asakura, Kengo Kora, Takeo Chii, Nobuko Miyamoto, Atsuko Takahata, Tomoko Tabata, Tatekawa, Takaya Kamikawa, Hikaru Ijuin, Ryudo Uzaki, Nakamura Shichinosuke II, Isao Hashizume, Yukiji Asaoka, Tatsuya Nakadai Screened at:  Review 2, NYC, 10/14/15 Opens:  October 17, 2014 If your high school World History course was like mine, you spent a little time on Greece and Rome, another few weeks on medieval  [ Read More ]

The post The Tale of Princess Kaguya Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

The lineups for the Mavericks, Discovery, and Tiff Kids parts of the Toronto Film Festival were announced, wrapping up a series of lineup announcements for the Toronto International Film Festival.

With the added films, the festival’s entire slate is now a whopping 393 movies. Two hundred eighty-five of those movies are feature films, of which 143 are world premieres.

The Mavericks portion of the festival includes onstage discussions following the screening of each film. Do I Sound Gay? will be followed by a talk between director David Thorpe and sex-advice guru Dan Savage. Also premiering in that space is The 50 Year Argument,...

Bill Murray is coming to Toronto folks. Actually, the film he stars in (Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent) is having its official World Premiere launch at the jaw-dropping 285 feature film 2014 Tiff line-up. In the final batch of items we finally get the confirmation that 2014′s Palme d’Or Winner Winter Sleep (which gets added along with a trio of others to the Masters Programme) will show, and Tomm Moore’s highly anticipated Song of the Sea (among the four item line-up for Tiff Kids) also lands. Worth mentioning are the sprinkling of add-ons to the various other sections (Marjane Satrapi’s Sundance preemed The Voices, Matt Shakman’s Cut Bank and the world preem of Danis Tanovic’s Tigers) with a Studio Ghibli docu item being fitted into the Tiff Docs, but it is the Discovery Programme that finally takes shape.

The “up-and-comers” include Berlin Film Fest (and future Nyff...

Gkids, a distributor of award-winning animation for both adult and family audiences, has announced the English voice cast for The Tale of Princess Kaguya, the highly anticipated new feature from Studio Ghibli. It is the first film in fourteen years from legendary Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. In addition to Chloe Moretz as The Princess Kaguya, the film features the voices of James Caan, Mary Steenburgen, Darren Criss, Lucy Liu, Beau Bridges, James Marsden, Oliver Platt and Dean Cain. (Full cast list below.) Gkids has North American distribution rights for the film and is planning a theatrical release starting October 17, with national expansion to follow. The film will qualify for the Academy Awards and other awards season contests.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya made its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Variety hailed it as "a visionary tour-de-force." Eight years in the making, the film is the untold story of The Princess Kaguya,...

Lady Snowblood 1 & 2

Stars: Meiko Kaji, Toshio Kurosawa, Masaaki Daimon, Miyoko Akaza, Shinichi Uchida, Takeo Chii, Noboru Nakaya | Written by Norio Osada | Directed by Toshiya Fujita

There is a certain style to vengeance films and it’s arguable that Hollywood is losing the ability to make a truly good one. Kill Bill of course is a good example of a good vengeance story, but the truth is it’s more of homage to films that Tarantino is inspired by, and a damn good one. Lady Snowblood is the obvious inspiration for Kill Bill and of course Tarantino would never hide this, it’s his type of movie and quite honestly, what a movie it is.

Lady Snowblood also known as Yuki Kashima is described as a child of the netherworld, she was born for vengeance then educated in the ways to enact it. Her life has had one aim, even the way she was conceived.

Hot-shot reporter Nami (Eri Kanuma) employs some underhand tactics in order to get her scoop, which just so happens to be on rape and its consequences. Cold and ruthless, Nami will stop at nothing to badger her damaged victims into confessing all the gory details of their assaults so that she may turn them into exploitative media fodder and maintain her status as top office reporting lady. That is until the tables turn in quite spectacularly horrific style ...

Nami, the third edition to the Angel Guts box set, continues the exploration of rape and its personal, social and cultural implications this time through the film's namesake, Nami. This plucky young journalist has no qualms whatsoever about physically tackling her victims, literally wrestling their sad stories from them. This, of course, provides a wealth of engineered situations in which to depict the act of rape and director Noboro Tanaka certainly doesn't...