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The phrase "style over substance" is usually meant to be pejorative, but it doesn't have to be. It can be used to describe masterpieces like Suspiria, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Branded to Kill, Thx-1138, Playtime, In the Mood for Love, and countless other films, not to mention experimental cinema. There is nothing wrong with that. Ash, the new film by Steven Ellison (aka musician Flying Lotus), epitomizes style over substance, and it's stylish as hell. The only problem is that it tries too hard to have substance, and instead delivers a narrative full of plot holes, recycled ideas, and little emotional investment. Fortunately, the style of Ash and the lead performance by Eiza González are so impressive that it tips the scales heavily in the film's favor.

Space Is the Place for Flying Lotus

Flying Lotus is a visionary of sorts, and it's impressive how he managed to incorporate his...

Arrow continues its commitment to cult cinema with an exceptional February slate, led by two meticulously crafted Japanese crime thrillers, A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key. Streaming exclusively from February 10, these films mark a rare opportunity for audiences to experience the work of director Kazuo Mori, best known for Zatoichi at Large and a celebrated master of jidai-geki.

Both films feature Raiz? Ichikawa, a legendary figure in Japanese cinema, known for his work in Shinobi: Band of Assassins and the Sleepy Eyes of Death series. A Certain Killer follows a quiet sushi chef who moonlights as an assassin, eliminating targets with poison-tipped needles. When his latest contract entangles him in a yakuza turf war, his carefully managed existence begins to unravel. Meanwhile, A Killer’s Key sees Ichikawa return as a lone wolf assassin posing as a dance instructor, drawn into a high-stakes cover-up that threatens to collapse a major crime syndicate.

“Yasuko, Songs of Days Past” tells the story of a love triangle involving the poet Chuya Nakahara, the literary critic Hideo Kobayashi, and the actress Yasuko Hasegawa in the 1920s. These are all historical figures and the plot is based on true events. While Nakahara and Kobayashi are known in the West, Hasegawa is relatively unknown today. However, she is the central figure in the story.

Yasuko, Songs of Days Past is screening at International Film Festival Rotterdam

Chuya Nakahara’s life was tragically cut short in 1937 at the young age of 30 due to tuberculosis. He was a pioneer of modernist poetry, and his work continued to gain recognition in the years following his untimely death, earning him comparisons to the Japanese Rimbaud. Director Kichitaro Negishi (“Distant Thunder” 1981) captures a moment from the poet’s youth when he fell in love with aspiring actress Yasuko Hasegawa, while also contending with...

Seijun Suzuki's 1966 gangster movie Tokyo Drifter is a classic of Japanese cinema that has influenced the film industry for decades to come. However, despite its now iconic status, Tokyo Drifter was not always an internationally renowned work. After serving in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, Suzuki became an assistant director at the Shochiku Company's Ofuna Studio. In 1954, Suzuki moved to the Nikkatsu Corporation, where he began as an assistant director before eventually writing screenplays and directing. At Nikkatsu, Suzuki developed a reputation for directing quality B-movies in the yakuza and action genres. Given shoestring budgets and extremely tight schedules, Suzuki found success through films such as Underworld Beauty, Take Aim at the Police Van, and Everything Goes Wrong.

While many of Suzuki's early works achieved moderate commercial success, his artistic breakthrough occurred in 1963 with the release of the yakuza film Youth of the Beast. Starting with Youth of the Beast,...

Scenes of gun shootouts have been an essential fixture in cinema since “The Great Train Robbery” (1903). Serving as a staple of cinematic spectacles, filmmakers have continuously competed to present their unique interpretations, whether through virtuosic camera work or unconventional set-up. Just think back to the final assault in Branded to Kill, John Woo ‘s personal rendition of the Mexican standoff in the iconic restaurant scene from A Better Tomorrow (1986) or more recently the climax shootout of Drug War. The list could go on forever.

Diao Yinan introduced a very peculiar variation of it in his noir film “Black Coal” set in far northern China. Fragments of a recently identified body have been discovered scattered across various coal mining sites, leaving Inspector Zhang with just one lead: a coal truck driver who has just resigned, and whose brother happens to be the proprietor of a hair salon. The scene unfolds as Zhang,...

The supposed demise of physical media has been well covered and long lamented, with each passing year bringing reports of yet another nail in the coffin of the once flourishing DVD and Blu-ray market. Fall 2023 brought a double whammy of bad news: Netflix shipped its final discs to customers before closing up its DVD department for good, and a month later, Best Buy announced that it would be phasing out the sale of physical media. Yet, while DVDs are no longer the massive revenue generator for studios that they were throughout the first decade of the 2000s, it has never been a better time to be a physical media enthusiast. Thanks to independent labels like Criterion, Kino Lorber, Shout! Factory, Arrow, Imprint, Indicator, and many others, every month sees the release of well over a dozen exceptional titles, often lovingly restored and with indispensable scholarly extras.

That we’re living...

How unhinged does a film have to be to get a director fired? Or, more to the point, how unhinged does it have to be to get a seasoned gonzo cyclone like Suzuki Seijun fired? After more than 10 years of cranking out perverse pulp bonanzas for Nikkatsu studio, Suzuki ran afoul of producers in 1967 with Branded to Kill, a cubist fusillade that swiftly got the filmmaker sacked on charges of “incoherence.”

Of course, accusing the auteur behind Tattooed Life and Fighting Elegy of being incoherent is akin to accusing the Pacific Ocean of being wet, and yet it’s easy to see what about the film’s jumbled spirit so infuriated the studio heads: While most of his earlier underworld sagas subversively stretched the skin of boilerplate yakuza thrillers this way and that while still functioning as commercial genre offerings, Branded to Kill is confrontational in its disdain for stylistic...

The crime movie belongs to a genre that has been constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed essentially since cinema began. In that canon, one of the most unique entries has to be Seijun Suzuki's 1967 yakuza film, Branded to Kill. Following Japan's third-best hitman on an odyssey through the crime underworld, Branded to Kill gleefully disavows the tried and true rules of the genre in favor of bold experimentation. This cost Suzuki his career, as he was blacklisted by the Japanese film industry for making films that "make no sense and no money." Yet, we are left with a film that carries a cinematic legacy with Jim Jarmusch and Park Chan-wook singing its praises. How did Suzuki manage to make a timeless film that cost him his career?...

Another month means another batch of films heading to The Criterion Collection. The next announced slate is for May 2023 and ushers in five new titles for the collection. Among them are Wings of Desire, Branded to Kill, Targets, Petite Maman, and Thelma & Louise. Per usual for Criterion, all the films are receiving physical re-releases with a mix of 4K Uhd, Blu-ray, and DVD formats. Each also comes packed with bonus features that include commentaries, deleted scenes, interviews, and more. They are currently up now for pre-order.

Your player and Oled alike shall receive a workout this May, Criterion having given some of the sharpest black-and-white cinema’s ever seen the 4K treatment. Wings of Desire––as much of a flagship title as anything among their catalogue, and in 4K even more of a unique opportunity to pretend you saw Nick Cave circa 1987––and Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, whose widescreen compositions are so honed they might cut glass, constitute nothing but very wise choices. I can’t express much enthusiasm for Thelma and Louis also getting 2,160 pixels, but I don’t run the show and these aren’t my decisions to make.

The Blu-ray side is formidable just on the basis of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, among the greatest and most venomous movies about movies––good luck enjoying the drive-in again––and bears further credit for its Adam Nayman essay. Because I haven’t seen...

By the second half of the 1960s, it was obvious that the relationship between director Seijun Suzuki and production company Nikkatsu was more than just a little strained. After years of yakuza-flicks and B-movies, Suzuki had proven with works such as “Youth of the Beast” he was fed up sticking to genre conventions as well as the rules enforced by his employer of what a certain movie has to be, what the story has to be like and essentially playing second fiddle to whatever the main feature his work was supposed to prepare the audience for. Having repeatedly violated that agreement, Suzuki was given another opportunity, resulting in “Carmen from Kawachi”, a B-movie based on themes from Georges Bizet. While the story has certain aspects following the conventions of B-movies, its style and images often transcend its origin, making it a very interesting precursor to Suzuki’s “Branded to Kill...

Update: The Venice Film Festival has now handed out its awards, and for the second time ever crowned a documentary as the Golden Lion, while also spreading the love around.

Oscar winner Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed walked away with the top honor tonight. It follows Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra (2013) as a non-fiction Lion winner. The film is a portrait of Nan Goldin, the 68-year-old photographer who was prescribed Oxycontin, quickly became addicted to it, found recovery through a replacement drug and then threw her energies into calling the Sackler family to account. In Deadline’s review Stephanie Bunbury wrote that the film “makes clear is that this is all of a piece with the photographs of drag queens, prostitutes and parties, the angry records of AIDS sufferers, the portraits that show glamour and tenderness where others might see the grotesque.”

Meanwhile, Luca Guadagnino scored Best...

As our 2022 Venice Film Festival coverage wraps up, the juries have now unveiled their picks, most notably featuring Julianne Moore’s competition jury. Leading the pack is Laura Poitras’ new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which picked up the top prize of Golden Lion, while Alice Diop, Luca Guadagnino, Cate Blanchett, Jafar Panahi, Colin Farrell, and more also received awards.

See the list of winners, with a hat tip to Variety, along with links to our reviews––and check back soon for coverage of Saint Omer, No Bears, and more.

Competition

Golden Lion for Best Film: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras

Grand Jury Prize: “Saint Omer,” Alice Diop

Silver Lion for Best Director: “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino

Special Jury Prize: “No Bears,” Jafar Panahi

Best Screenplay: “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh

Volpi Cup for Best Actress: “TÁR,” Cate Blanchett

Volpi Cup for Best Actor: “The Banshees of Inisherin,...

‘Saint Omer’ takes Grand Jury prize; best director to Luca Guadagnino for ‘Bones And All’.

Laura Poitras’ All The Beauty And The Bloodshed won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, becoming only the second documentary to take the top prize in the event’s 90-year history.

”I need to thank the festival first and foremost, for understanding that documentary is cinema,” said US director Poitras, accepting the award. She proceeded to voice support for Iranian filmmaker and fellow Competition director Jafar Panahi, who is currently under arrest in his home country.

Scroll down for the full list of...

The 2022 Venice Film Festival has awarded Laura Poitras’ “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” the Golden Lion for Best Film, with Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett landing the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor and Best Actress.

The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Luca Guadagnino for “Bones and All.” The cannibal love story also saw co-star Taylor Russell win the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Young Actor or Actress.

In addition to Farrell, “The Banshees of Inisherin” won the award for Best Screenplay for writer-director Martin McDonagh. The film, which follows an abrupt fallout between two best friends (“In Bruges” co-stars Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), received a 13-minute standing ovation at its Tuesday premiere. Meanwhile, Blanchett won her second Volpi Cup (following her performance as Bob Dylan in 2007’s “I’m Not There”) for playing the world-renowned composer at the center of Todd Field’s “Tár.”

Also Read:

Brendan Fraser...

The winners of the 2022 Venice Film Festival are being announced this evening.

The 79th Venice Film Festival comes to a close today with the awards ceremony, held at the Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema from 6pm BST (7pm Cet).

Watch the ceremony live in the video above; Screen will be updating this page with the winners as they are announced.

The ceremony will be hosted by Spanish actress Rocio Munoz Morales, who also hosted the opening ceremony. A Competition jury led by Julianne Moore will award nine prizes, including the Golden Lion for best film.

Winners in the...

Click here to read the full article.

Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has won the 2022 Golden Lion for best film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival.

The documentary follows the life of artist Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty that was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic.

Poitras, an Oscar-winner for her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, dedicated the prize to Goldin.

“This is for Nan. I love you Nan. Monday is her birthday, so we’ll bring this to Nan,” she said.

Produced by Participant and Poitras’ Praxis Films, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed will go out domestically via Neon and HBO.

Cate Blanchett won Venice’s best actress honors for her bracing turn as a classical conductor in Todd Field’s Tár. The award kicks off the Oscar campaign for the film, and for Blanchett, who...

The Venice Film Festival draws to a close tonight with the awards ceremony, with Julianne Moore and her jury set to announce their standouts from the fest’s Competition selection. This post will be updated with winners as they’re announced.

Full List Of Winners

Horizons Extra

Audience Award: “Nezouh,” Soudade Kaadan

Venice Classics

Best Documentary of Cinema: “Fragments of Paradise,” K.D. Davison

Best Restored Film: “Branded to Kill,” Seijun Suzuki

Venice Immersive

Best Immersive Experience: “The Man Who Couldn’t Leave,” Chen Singing

Grand Jury Prize: “From the Main Square,” Pedro Harres

Special Jury Prize: “Eggscape,” German Heller

Venice Days (announced earlier)

Cinema of the Future Award: “The Maiden,” Graham Foy

Director’s Award: “Wolf and Dog,” Cláudia Varejão

People’s Choice Award: “Blue Jean,” Georgia Oakley

Critics’ Week (announced earlier)

Grand Prize: “Eismayer,” David Wagner

Special Mention: “Anhell69,” Theo Montoya

Audience Award: “Margini,” Niccolò Falsetti

Verona Film Club...

After nearly two weeks of lush red carpets, timed standing ovations, and viral “Don’t Worry Darling” drama, the 79th Venice Film Festival comes to a close on Saturday in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema (Lido di Venezia). Julianne Moore chairs the festival’s jury alongside her fellow judges and elite film peers Mariano Cohn, Leonardo di Costanzo, Audrey Diwan, Leila Hatami, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rodrigo Sorogoyen.

“I feel like so often the discussion around the future of cinema ends up being a discussion that’s more commercial, more business oriented,” Moore said in her opening remarks on August 31. “When we talk about the future of cinema it often degrades into what the future of the business is. That’s not the future of art.”

Established in 1932, Venice is the oldest ongoing cinematic awards celebration and is regarded among the world’s most esteemed international film festivals. 22 titles...

White NoiseCOMPETITIONWhite Noise (Noah Baumbach)Il Signore Delle Formiche (Gianni Amelio)The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)L’Immensita (Emanuele Crialese)Saint Omer (Alice Diop)Blonde (Andrew Dominik)Tár (Todd Field)Love Life (Koji Fukada)Bardo, False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths (Alejandro G. Inarritu)Athena (Romain Gavras)Bones & All (Luca Guadagnino)The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)Beyond The Wall (Vahid Jalilvand)The Banshees Of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre)Chiara (Susanna Nicchiarelli)Monica (Andrea Pallaoro)No Bears (Jafar Panahi)All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (Laura Poitras)A Couple (Frederick Wiseman)The Son (Florian Zeller)Our Ties (Roschdy Zem)Other People’s Children (Rebecca Zlotowski)Out Of COMPETITIONFictionThe Hanging Sun (Francesco Carrozzini)When The Waves Are Gone (Lav Diaz)Living (Oliver Hermanus)Dead For A Dollar (Walter Hill)Call Of God (Kim Ki-duk)Dreamin’ Wild (Bill Pohlad)Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)Siccità (Paolo Virzi)Pearl (Ti West)Don’t Worry Darling...

[…] Cinema City’s comedies were dominant soon after they first appeared and made fat profits back in ’79. Thus, the company over-expanded, recruiting a large number of directors, including New Wave directors. More than ten directors joined forces with the company all at once. They worked either in a collaboration, such as Tsui Hark [Aces Go Places 3 (83), All the wrong spies (83), Working Class(85)], Kirk Wong or in a satellite alliance, like Dennis Yu [Comedy (84), Musical Singer (85)] and Yuen Woo-ping. The box office reception of these films was only average; some others, for example, Life After Life and Once Upon a Rainbow, even flopped. 1984 could be said to be the heyday of Cinema City, when comedies such as Happy Ghost, Kung Hei Fat Choy and Merry Christmas were produced. It was precisely because of the dominance of Cinema City that the New Wave migrated to the mainstream cinema at an accelerated pace. (source: “Hong Kong New Wave Cinema” by Pak Tong Cheuk). One of...

A co-production of Shaw Brothers and the Nikkatsu Studio during the mid-60s, this James Bond inspired spy thriller stars a very young and less experienced Jimmy Wang Yu as secret agent Yang Ming Hsuan, who works for the Japanese brunch of Apss (Asia Police Secret Service). George (Jo Shishido) is a Japanese- Malaysian criminal who smuggles gold in Asia; furthermore, he wants to bring down the Japanese economy just because his Japanese father is responsible for the death of his mother. Upon learning about George’s evil plan, Apss promptly sends Agent Yang after him. Consequently, the cat-and -mouse game is on, sending him trotting from Japan to Hong Kong and finally a showdown in an ocean tanker full of gold in Macau. Yang also believes that the death of a wealthy businessman who might actually be his long- lost father is the doing of George’s outfit.

Buy...

Creating a film that looks like a silent one but actually is not and having a narrative that is a pastiche of elements that includes tribute to the film noir of the 1920s, comedy, and a repeated breaking of the fourth wall is not exactly an easy task. However, this is exactly what Kaizo Hayashi accomplished with “To Sleep so as to Dream”, in an effort that netted him awards from Mainichi Film Concours and Yokohama Film Festival (also for Takeo Kimura’s art direction).

The story takes place somewhere in the 50s, and revolves around the disappearance of Bellflower, the daughter of Madame Cherrysblossom, an aging silent film actress. The Madame tasks her elderly butler with finding her, and he gives the job to two detectives, egg-swallowing Uotsuka and his assistant, Kobayashi, who soon proves to be a master of martial arts apart from constantly aloof. The trio is immediately contacted by the kidnappers,...

by Omar Rasya Joenoes

When Luis Buñuel, that legendary, genius director among legendary, genius directors, refused the order of his mentor, Jean Epstein, to assist Epstein’s mentor, Abel Gance, Epstein reportedly chided Buñuel by calling him a little prick compared to Gance and ending his scolding of the aspiring filmmaker by saying, “You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they’re crazy people.” Reportedly, this took place some time in 1927.

Fast forward almost one hundred years later, Epstein’s words toward the father of cinematic surrealism sound glaringly ridiculous now for two reasons.

Firstly, while Abel Gance’s stature of a revered pioneer remains legit, Luis Buñuel’s stature is much higher. His accolades, influence, and filmography, with all due respect, dwarf not only Gance’s but also Epstein’s. The frequency of Buñuel’s body of work appearing at the top or near the top of lists belonging...

“Branded to Kill” is Seijun Suzuki’s absurdist nihilistic statement. A film compelled by Freudian drives, surreally, brought into the bright light of day. From this perspective, the utterly insane plot makes deranged sense. Suzuki worked with a team of writers, in a daring collaborative effort; to bash the out script in double quick time. The studio, Nikkatsu rejected the initial script by another writer. Suzuki took this to mean that the studio was out of ideas, so eight men frantically wrote a script, and Suzuki bolted it altogether in a riot of cinema!

Action and eroticism were the popular fashions in Japanese cinema through 1966/1967, so Suzuki intended to give the studio what they want! This slice of pragmatism led to him being fired, a long law-suit and being blacklisted for a decade.

“Branded to Kill” is an anarchic gangster film, jarring in tone, brutal in action and wild in sex,...

After his infamous legal dispute with production company Nikkatsu, Japanese director Seijun Suzuki would return to the world of film with his 1977 movie “A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness”, ten years after “Branded to Kill” got him fired by Nikkatsu’s president Kyusaku Hori. While the film’s reception was rather poor upon release, its take on the world of fame and sports is perhaps one of the most bitter works of the director, combining his visual style and concept of how a popular icon is received in today’s world as well as the darkness that follows immense fame.

“A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness” is screening at Japan Society

At the center of the story we find Reiko (Yoko Shiraki), a professional model, who signs a contract with the editor of a golfing fashion magazine who wants to boost his company’s sales. In order to make her...

By Omar Rasya Joenoes

“Are you married?”

“I hate men.”

“Then, you have no hope.”

“My hope is to die.”

The conversation in the search description takes place on a ride home, under the pouring rain. It is initiated by a man, who happens to be Japan’s no. 3 hitman, and answered by a woman, who is a suicidal femme fatale. Witnessing their first exchange is a dead bird, hung between them. And in this weirdest of all film-noir films, the scene belongs to a long line of surreal, mind-boggling, out-of-this-world scene after scene after scene after scene.

“Japanese films are weird” is surely a stereotype most of you, if not all of you, have heard at least once before. It is not entirely true and not entirely mistaken. With cult titles like Funky Forest (2005), Hausu (1977), Big Man Japan (2007), Versus (2000), Tokyo Gore Police (2008), RoboGeisha (2009), Tetsuo the Iron Man...

Even though he concentrated more on writing scripts for the majority of his career, Yamatoya Atsushi also directed some of the most interesting entries in the “pink film”-genre of the 1960s. In the same year he collaborated on the script to Seijun Suzuki’s classic “Branded to Kill”, he also shot his feature debut “Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands”. As with many of these kind of films, the label “sex film” is to some degree a smoke screen as viewing the actual film reveals an experimental genre mixture, dealing with topics ranging from toxic masculinity to the obsession with sex and violence.

After he has received a film showing his wife Sae (Noriko Tatsumi) being raped and violated by masked men, real estate agent Naka (Seigi Nogami) hires detective/hitman Sho (Yuichi Minato) to find and kill the kidnappers. After he has shown him the disturbing film,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

What do The Earrings of Madame De…, How the West Was Won, and an avant-garde series have in common? They’re all inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey and play in a program this weekend, as does a 70mm print of Kubrick’s film alongside the museum’s incredible new exhibit.

Even though he concentrated more on writing scripts for the majority of his career, Yamatoya Atsushi also directed some of the most interesting entries in the “pink film”-genre of the 1960s. In the same year he collaborated on the script to Seijun Suzuki’s classic “Branded to Kill”, he also shot his feature debut “Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands”. As with many of these kind of films, the label “sex film” is to some degree a smoke screen as viewing the actual film reveals an experimental genre mixture, dealing with topics ranging from toxic masculinity to the obsession with sex and violence.

Buy This Film

After he has received a film showing his wife Sae (Noriko Tatsumi) being raped and violated by masked men, real estate agent Naka (Seigi Nogami) hires detective/hitman Sho (Yuichi Minato) to find and kill the kidnappers. After he has shown him the disturbing film,...

During the late 60s and early 70s, famed screenwriter and director Kaneto Shindō wrote a series of scripts about World War II’s legacy on Japan and the Japanese psyche for a few of those decades’ greatest directors. These included one story about the war’s lingering pains and injustices with Kenji Fukasaku’s solemn and politically fiery 1972 “Under the Flag of the Rising Sun”, another set during the thick of the conflict with Kihachi Okamoto’s graphic and harrowing (if messy) “Battle of Okinawa” and the earliest of them, Seijun Suzuki’s 1966 “Fighting Elegy” which is starkly opposite from from the rest in not being serious at all — at least outwardly.

“Fighting Elegy” screened at Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival 2019

1935 Okayama. A militarized boys’ middle school. Catholic student Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi) finds himself sharing the same Catholic boarding house with the sweet and innocent Michiko (Junko Asano), who...

Rather unfairly, we expect the Criterion Collection to define significant cinema, all on its own. When the company released Michael Bay's Armageddon on DVD, for example, I recall a great disturbance in the (cinephilia) force. How dare they cheapen Art with Commerce!!! Of course, Criterion had already released John Woo's The Killer and Hardboiled on DVD by that point, as well as Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, but though those films displayed a populist bent, they were critically-acclaimed and above the fray, as it were. As time passed, and the Criterion Collection's releases grew into the hundreds, the disquietude about Bay's early representation on Criterion dissipated. On the Asian cinema scene, however, I believe there has been more consternation and/or disappointment that...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

“Why do all you big shots say the same stupid lines?”

Japanese director Seijun Suzuki is perhaps the greatest of all mavericks within the film industry of his country, certainly among the first voices bringing fresh ideas, images and above all a re-definition of the traditional genre the big studios like his employers at Nikkatsu churned out, year after year until the 1960s. Similar perhaps to French director Jean-Luc Godard, a comparison which is often mentioned in reviews or discussions about his body of work, his cinema, like “Branded to Kill” or “Youth of the Beast”, did not reach its audience at the time of its release, but survived over the years and have added to the reputation of Suzuki as an artist who simply grew tired of repeating the same formula because it meant a steady paycheck.

According to authors Frederick Veith and Phil Kaffen, it...

Review by By Roger Carpenter

Fans of Japanese B-cinema and yakuza films have long known of Seijun Suzuki’s cult status both in Japan and overseas here in America. But availability of his films have been limited to his most prestigious pictures being released in fairly expensive editions on boutique labels, again implying that his films are only for high-minded cineastes with vast experience in film criticism.

But over the last couple of years Arrow Video USA has taken up Suzuki’s cause, releasing over a dozen of his films, ranging from his B-movie programmers at Nikkatsu Studios to his truly independent arthouse productions of the 1980’s. Collections such as Seijun Suzuki: The Early Years Volume 1 and Volume 2 each collect five early films from the director when he was churning out programmers for Nikkatsu at an astounding rate. Each collection is loosely categorized, thus Volume 1 is subtitled The Youth Movies...

Seijun Suzuki, The Early Years is now available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video

Youths On The Loose And Rebels Without Causes In The Unruly Seishun Eiga Youth Movies Of Japanese Iconoclast Seijun Suzuki

Making their home-video debuts outside Japan, this diverse selection of Nikkatsu youth movies (seishun eiga) charts the evolving style of the B-movie maverick best known for the cult classics Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Branded to Kill (1967).

The Boy Who Came Back (1958) marks the first appearances of Nikkatsu Diamond Guys and regular Suzuki collaborators Akira Kobayashi and Jo Shishido, with Kobayashi cast as the hot-headed hoodlum fresh out of reform school who struggles to make a clean break with his tearaway past.

The Wind-of-Youth Group Crosses the Mountain Pass (1961) is a carnivalesque tale of a young student who hooks up with a down-at-heels travelling circus troupe.

Teenage Yakuza (1962) stars Tamio Kawaji as the high-school vigilante protecting his...

Review by Roger Carpenter

Director Yasuharu Hasebe was a well-known director in Japan right up until his death in 2009. He directed most of the Stray Cat Rock series of films in the early 1970s as well as the final installment of the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song. He became known as the “Father of Violent Pink,” after directing a series of graphically violent and sexually sadistic films for Nikkatsu Studios with titles such as Rape!; Assault! Jack the Ripper; Rape! 13th Hour; and Secret Honeymoon: Rape Train. These films proved to be both highly controversial and very lucrative for Hasebe and Nikkatsu but, typical of Nikkatsu, the studio execs got cold feet after much bad press and began toning down their series of violent pink films.

But before all this, Hasebe cut his teeth as an assistant director for the great Seijun Suzuki, himself a...

Review by Roger Carpenter

In Japanese history the Meiji Period, which lasted from 1868 – 1912, saw Japan change from a centuries-old isolated feudal society to a more modern society. The Meiji Period saw Japan being opened to the West and the influence of Europe and America on Japanese culture and society. This period was a time of immense change for the Japanese. It was followed by a very short-lived period called the Taisho period, which lasted just 14 years, from 1912 – 1926. The Taisho Period was a time of liberalism and democratic thinking in Japan, and also marked the beginning of a creative movement called ero guro nansensu. Based upon the shortened English words erotic, grotesque, and nonsense, the ero guro nansensu movement began in literature and art, eventually expanding into theatre, film, and even music.

Over time the original intent of the movement has evolved from an exploration of ideas or objects that were malformed,...

Mubi is showing Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy from November 13 - December 27, 2017 in the United States and United Kingdom.In a now-famous quote from a 1997 video interview, the late Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki paraphrases Nikkatsu Studio executives when he declares, "I make movies that make no sense and make no money.” The quip is put forth in the context of 1967’sBranded to Kill, the pop-influenced noir that arguably stands as the artistic pinnacle of Suzuki’s career as a filmmaker of yakuza, gangster, and proto-pink films with Nikkatsu. While others have contested Suzuki’s claims that his nonsensical and unbankable output lead to the fissure between the filmmaker and Nikkatsu—pointing instead to the drain he and his dedicated coterie of assistant directors placed on the studio—Branded to Kill was the cap to a prodigious run of no less than two features a year from 1956 through 1966, and Suzuki's his...

Busan International Film Festival will honor late Japanese director Seijun Suzuki with its Asian Filmmaker of the Year award at the event in October, organizers said Thursday.

Suzuki churned out dozens of B-movies, many of them about yakuza gangsters, in the late 1950s and 1960s, infusing them with his own brand of quirky cinematic flair and comedy. He was eventually fired by studio Nikkatsu for pushing the boundaries too far on his 1968 yakuza film Branded to Kill, which was later hailed as a classic.

The Japanese auteur has been cited as a major influence by various directors, including...

”Haunting, Hypnotic, Flamboyant, Erotic, Bizarre… Suzuki!”

The Taisho Trilogy from director Seijun Suzuki will be available from Arrow Academy on August 8th

After over a decade in the wilderness following his firing from Nikkatsu for Branded to Kill (1967), maverick director Seijun Suzuki returned with a vengeance with his critically-praised tryptic of cryptic supernatural dramas set during the liberal enlightenment of Japan s Taisho Era (1912-26).

In the multiple Japanese Academy Award-winning Zigeunerweisen (1980), two intellectuals and former colleagues from military academy involve their wives in a series of dangerous sexual games. In Kageroza (1981), a playwright is drawn like a moth to a flame to a mysterious beauty who might be a ghost, while Yumeji (1991) imagines the real-life painter-poet Takehisa Yumeji s encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.

Presented together on Blu-ray for the first time outside of Japan, the films in the Taisho Trilogy are considered Suzuki s masterpieces in his homeland.

The Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival - Nifff - has long been a favourite European genre celebration round these parts, and is warming up for its 17th edition, scheduled to run from 30 June - 8 July in the picturesque Swiss city. While the full line-up will not be unveiled until 15 June, the festival has announced that this year's festival will include a major 10-film retrospective of Japanese master filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, who tragically passed away on 13 February. Best remembered for his surreal yakuza flick Branded to Kill, which saw him unceremoniously fired from Nikkatsu Studos, Suzuki enjoyed a long and fruitful career that spanned 50 years and brought us such undeniable genre classics as Tokyo Drifter and Youth of the Beast. While the...

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Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveriesNEWSLam SuetThis year's Asian Film Awards are most notable for giving beloved Hong Kong character actor (and Johnnie To axiom) Lam Suet the award for Best Supporting Actor (for Trivisa). We were also happy to see that Tsui Hark (still madly inventive with this year's Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back) was given the Lifetime Achievement Award.Chinese actress Li Li-hua has died at the age of 92. While not very well known in the West—except perhaps in the obscure Frank Borzage film China Doll (1958)—Li's work for the Shaw Brothers studio and, later, Golden Harvest, minted many classics, including Li Han-hsiang's The Magnificent Concubine (1962), and Storm Over the Yangtse River (1969), as well as King Hu's The Fate of Lee Khan (1975).For those who aren't able to travel to the Locarno Film Festival but are able to...

Japanese film director who gained a worldwide cult following for his flamboyance and irreverence

The Japanese film-maker Seijun Suzuki, who has died aged 93, was best known in the west for his deliriously entertaining and inventively realised crime and gangster B-movies, and turned out at a conveyor-belt rate by Nikkatsu studios in the 1960s.

Among such colourful titles as Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards! (1963) and Tattooed Life (1965), for many the masterpiece of this period is Branded to Kill (1967), a dream-logic portrait of a hitman embroiled in a battle for top-dog position in the underworld ranking of contract killers. However, few cared much for it at the time, least of all the studio president, Kyusaku Hori, who fired the director, claiming his films didn’t make sense and didn’t make money. Suzuki sued for unfair dismissal, an act that saw him blacklisted by the industry and relegated to directing...

“I make movies that make no sense,” Seijun Suzuki would often say, and he wasn’t being modest. The prolific director, who died earlier this month at the age of 93, was the Jackson Pollock of Japanese cinema, an irrepressibly creative artist who painted with gobs of color and geysers of fake blood in order to defy the strictures of narrative and remind viewers that movies are more than the stories they tell.

His hyper-stylized gangster sagas, which had a way of turning the most basic B-picture plots into unfettered symphonies for the senses, were born out of a rabid intolerance for boredom; audiences never knew what was going to happen next, and sometimes it’s tempting to suspect that Suzuki didn’t either. Few directors ever did more to fundamentally demolish our understanding of what film could be, and even fewer did so while working under the auspices of a major production studio.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveriesNEWSSeijun SuzukiThe great Japanese studio rabble rouser Seijun Suzuki, best known for his crazed remixes of pulp genre films in the late 1950s and 1960s (Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill) and also for his late career renaissance (Pistol Opera, Princess Raccoon), has died at the age of 92.On the other side of the industry, Time critic and documentary filmmaker Richard Shickel has also passed away.On a more positive note, the second film program for the great Knoxville music festival Big Eats has been announced, and it's a humdinger, ranging from a focus on directors Jonathan Demme and Kevin Jerome Everson to programs of new avant-garde work.Recommended Viewinga researcher in Quebec has identified the only known moving image footage of Marcel Proust, found in a 1904 recording of a wedding.Finally, a view at Terrence Malick's long-in-the-works drama set in the Austin music scene,...

Cult Japanese filmmaker Suzuki Seijun has died at the age of 93. Best known for avant-garde yakuza masterpiece Branded to Kill, the director made his name turning out features for Nikkatsu studio throughout the 1960's. Starting his career at Shochiku, Suzuki moved to Nikkatsu in 1954. Stepping into the director's chair in 1956, he was highly productive over the next decade, putting out several titles a year, including such classics as Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh and Tokyo Drifter. The relationship between director and studio would eventually turn sour, with Suzuki earning the ire of his employers for his surreal and wildly imaginative takes on the studio's B-movie and yakuza material. Eventually he was fired and found himself struggling to get work for...

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Seijun Suzuki, the celebrated Japanese director behind such cult films as Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, has died at the age of 93. He died February 13 in Tokyo, with the cause of death given as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Suzuki was largely famed for matching pop art visuals and pulp stories and his work influenced directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Baz Luhrmann and Wong Kar-Wai. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Suzuki served in Japan's…...

Film-maker who paired pop art visuals and yakuza hitmen in Tokyo Drifter leaves behind a singular, surreal body of work that gained international acclaim

Celebrated Japanese film director Seijun Suzuki, best known for cult 1960s yakuza films Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill, has died at the age of 93. Suzuki died on 13 February, with the cause given as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in a statement from Nikkatsu film studios.

Born in 1923, Suzuki served in Japan’s meteorological corps in the second world war, and then in 1948 joined the Shochiku studio as an assistant director. Despite spending his time there as “a melancholy drunk”, as he described it, he was hired by the newly reopened Nikkatsu in 1954, again as an assistant director. Two years later he graduated to the director’s chair with Victory Is Mine, a pop-song movie credited under his given name, Seitaro Suzuki.

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Japanese director Seijun Suzuki died Feb. 13 at a Tokyo hospital after a battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which affects the lungs. He was 93.

His death was announced by Nikkatsu, the studio that famously fired him in 1967 after 12 years and 40 films, for what is now seen as his masterpiece, Branded to Kill. The film was made in black and white as a punishment for his work on Tokyo Drifter — now also considered a classic — the year before. Both films were intended by Nikkatsu to be straightforward, B-movie yakuza gangster flicks, but Suzuki’s experimental style,...