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Following the recent release of the original Godzilla on 4K Ultra HD, The Criterion Collection is bringing Godzilla vs. Biollante to 4K Uhd and Blu-ray on March 18.

Released in 1989, the 17th installment in Toho’s classic kaiju franchise has been newly restored in 4K with Japanese 5.0 surround DTS-hd Master Audio and newly translated English subtitles.

Written and directed by Kazuki Ōmori (Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah), the film stars Kunihiko Mitamura, Yoshiko Tanaka, Masanobu Takashima, Megumi Odaka, Toru Minegishi, Yasuko Sawaguchi, Toshiyuki Nagashima, and Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla.

Special Features include:

Audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan (new) 1993 making-of featurette with director Kazuki Omori and special-effects director Koichi Kawakita, among others 1999 featurette on the Biollante and Super X2 vehicle concepts Deleted special effects TV spots and trailers An essay by sci-fi and horror film expert Jim Cirronella

Criterion writes, “Diving into delirious realms of imagination, this second film of the...

Survivor Ballads: Three Films by Shohei Imamura is currently available on a 3-Disc Special Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Academy

Throughout the 1980s, Shohei Imamura, a leading figure of the Japanese New Wave era of the 1960s, cemented his international reputation as one of the most important directors of his generation with a series of films that all competed at Cannes to great critical acclaim. This exclusive box set from Arrow Academy presents restored versions of three late career classics from the legendary filmmaker.

Based on an ancient folktale, The Ballad of Narayama (1983) was the first of two works from the director to win the prestigious Cannes Palme d Or. Imamura s magnum opus depicts the members of an extended farming family eking out their existence in the mountainous north of Japan against the backdrop of the changing seasons before village lore decrees they make the sacrifice of abandoning their aged...

Although his last feature “Zegen” was not quite the success production company Toei had hoped for, they, nevertheless, wanted to continue their collaboration with renowned director Shohei Imamura and gave him the opportunity to tell a story he had been thinking about for quite some time. Based on Masuji Ibuse’s novel of the same name, the project “Black Rain” was set in Japan in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a work which cinephiles, critics and film scholars alike often regard as an exception to Imamura’s work in the 1980s, as it bears more similarities to the features he directed in the 1960s given its radical imagery, tone and themes. At the same time, “Black Rain” follows Imamura’s concept of the period piece as a tale set in the past but which has a striking significance for the present, and even for the future,...

'The Beginning or the End' 1947 with Robert Walker and Tom Drake. Hiroshima bombing 70th anniversary: Six movies dealing with the A-bomb terror Seventy years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Ultimately, anywhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died – in addition to dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and most other living beings in that part of the world. Three days later, America dropped a second atomic bomb, this time over Nagasaki. Human deaths in this other city totaled anywhere between 40,000-80,000. For obvious reasons, the evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been a quasi-taboo in American films. After all, in the last 75 years Hollywood's World War II movies, from John Farrow's Wake Island (1942) and Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001), almost invariably have presented a clear-cut vision...

*full disclosure: a Blu-Ray copy of this film was provided by Echo Bridge Entertainment for review. Director: Kazuki Ohmori. Writers: Shinichirô Kobayashi (story), Kazuki Ohmori. Cast: Kunihiko Mitamura, Yoshiko Tanaka and Masanobu Takashima. Not many North American video releases of the Godzilla films are as thoughtful as Criterion's release of the original film, Media Blaster's Destroy All Monsters or Echo Bridge Entertainment's release Godzilla vs. Biollante. The single featurette is what sells this product. It reveals some secrets in how this film marked the Heisei period of this nuclear monster's reign and it shows that not all effects have to be CGI driven. In the late '80's, the method to create special effects involved matte paintings, models and simple tricks of the camera to create the illusion. These heydays are long gone by today's standards. But can anyone imagine what the imagineers of "Walking with Dinosaurs," the arena spectacular could have done if.

Kuroi ame / Black Rain (1989) Direction: Shohei Imamura Screenplay: Shohei Imamura and Toshirô Ishidô; from Masuji Ibuse’s novel Cast: Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa Animego’s DVD release of Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain includes as a bonus feature a selection of World War II-era anti-Japanese propaganda films. Sponsored by various U.S. government bureaucracies, most of these shorts traffic in the usual sort of wartime racism and paranoia which, depending on your sensibility, you will find either disturbing or amusing. The most egregious of these is something called My Japan, which features an actor in yellow-face hectoring the American audience into buying more war bonds by boasting that Japan won’t be defeated [...]...

AnimEigo has released a massive DVD box set titled Japan at the War. The set compiles four previously released AnimEigo titles with the intent of providing a Japanese perspective on the Second World War. Kihachi Okamoto's Japan's Longest Day (1967) and Battle of Okinawa (1971) are featured as are Kosaku Yamashita's Father of the Kamikaze (1974) and Shohei Imamura's highly acclaimed Black Rain (1988). Detailed synopses (courtesy of AnimEigo) and full technical specs are featured below.

Japan's Longest Day

On August 15th, 1945, the Japanese people faced utter destruction.  Millions of soldiers and civilians were dead, the rest were starving, and their cities had been reduced to piles of rubble--two of them vaporized by atomic bombs. The government was deadlocked.  To break the impasse, the cabinet took the unprecedented step of asking the Emperor to decide the fate of the nation.  Toshiro Mifune leads an all-star cast in a powerful film about...