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The last year has been great for Kitano Takeshi fans. While the director's recent output hasn't exactly set the world on fire outside of his two Outrage films, home video collectors have encountered a wealth of treasures as his early films have become available on Blu-ray for the first time in 2016. Most of these features came to us by way of UK specialist label Third Window Films, who've previous released Hana-bi, Kikujiro, Dolls, and A Scene at the Sea, and continue their winning record with Kids Return. However, now there's another label helping to fill in the gaps, Film Movement with their recent releases of Kitano's first two directorial features, Violent Cop and Boiling Point. Are they worth the upgrade? Check out our thoughts...

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

★★★★☆ Proving himself once again a master of comic timing and pathos, Takeshi Kitano's 1996 feature Kids Return represents something of a thematic medley for the director, playing in equal parts as a high school comedy, gangster film and boxing drama. While it is perhaps not as stylistically accomplished as his later Dolls, nor as emotionally gut-wrenching as Hana-Bi, Kids Return is still a charming turn from the reliably idiosyncratic 'Beat' Takeshi.

★★★★☆ After Hana-Bi and Kikujiro, Dolls is the third and final Blu-ray release from Third Window films in their collection of films by Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano. Dolls is arguably the strangest of the three films and undoubtedly the most beautiful, with cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima filling the screen with stunning compositions of colour and motion. Holding the anthology narrative together are Matsumoto (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Sawako (Miho Kanno). The pair were once engaged, before Matsumoto was forced by his parents to abandon her and marry his boss's daughter instead.

Exclusive: Toei sells Us-based Wayne Wang’s Japanese-language feature starring Beat Kitano.

Japan’s Toei Company has sold Chinese-American director Wayne Wang’s Japanese-language film While The Women Are Sleeping to a raft of territories including Spain (Mediatres Estudio), China (Lemon Tree Media), Taiwan (Sky Digi Entertainment) and Hong Kong (Neofilms).

Starring actor-director Beat (aka Takeshi) Kitano, Hidetoshi Nishijima (Dolls) and Shioli Kutsuna (The Assassin), the film is set in a seaside resort where a novelist gets to know a mysterious older man-younger woman couple.

Based on Spanish author Javier Marias’ eponymous short story, which was published in The New Yorker magazine, the film received its world premiere in the Berlinale’s Panorama section last month.

All feature new 2K remasters from Office Kitano!

The first 1000 copies of each feature cardboard slipcases with new illustrated artwork by Marie Bergeron supported by Filmdoo’s Film Creativity Competition.

All 3 now available to pre-order at: http://amzn.to/20wQ1BA

Hana-bi – January 11th

30 minute documentary from the film’s original release

Interview with Takeshi Kitano from the film’s original release

New Audio commentary by film critic Mark Schilling

New trailer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwTWtAE3ylY

Kikujiro – February 22nd

Jam Session – 90 minute documentary on Kikujiro directed by the award-winning Japanese director Makoto Shinozaki

Dolls – March 14th

Interviews with Takeshi Kitano, Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima & Yohij Yamamoto

Behind the Scenes

Video from the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival

Takeshi Kitano – Biography

The success of Hana-bi has confirmed Takeshi Kitano as a leading figure of international cinema. Among its numerous awards, Hana-bi won the Golden...

Takeshi Kitano’s Office Kitano to receive Premio Raimondo Rezzonico award.

Takeshi Kitano’s production company Office Kitano is to be feted at Locarno with the Premio Raimondo Rezzonico award, bestowed upon a risk-taking independent producer or company.

Office Kitano officially became a production company in 1991, producing actor-director Kitano’s third feature, A Scene at the Sea. All of Kitano’s films have been produced under the label since.

Office Kitano president Masayuki Mori began producing films with other directors in 1998, beginning with Ikinai, directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, and in 2000 the company began collaborating with director Jia Zhangke, as well as producer Shôzô Ichiyama.

The outfit also launched Tokyo FILMeX in 2000, a film festival that aims to highlight independent cinema

President Moro and producer Ichiyama will be present at Locarno to receive the award and speak to the public, and the festival will screen three films in tribute: Hana-bi (1997) and Dolls (2002), both directed by Kitano, and Unknown...

Director Wang talks to ScreenDaily about working with Takeshi Kitano.

Us-based director Wayne Wang, known for films such as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid In Manhattan, wrapped his shoot with iconic Japanese actor Beat Takeshi, a.k.a. Takeshi Kitano, for suspense mystery While The Women Are Sleeping in Tokyo on Saturday (July 11).

Kitano, the award-winning actor/director of films such as Zatoichi, Beyond Outrage and Hana-bi, uses the name Beat Takeshi when he works as an actor or performer.

Based on Javier Marias’ short story of the same title published in The New Yorker, While The Women Are Sleeping debuted in early form at Busan’s 2013 Asian Project Market.

Shot mostly in Izu, the film is about Sahara (Kitano), a mysterious older man who is at a resort with his young girlfriend. It is told from the point of view of Kenji, a writer who is also visiting the resort for a week with...

Renowned Japanese writer-director-actor Takeshi Kitano (Dolls, Zatoichi) returned to the big screen back in 2010 with his yakuza film, Outrage.

Debuting to great reviews at Cannes two years ago, Kitano is heading to Venice and Toronto next month with the sequel, Outrage Beyond, and now the first full-length trailer has been released – it’s in the original Japanese, with no subtitles, but it still looks awesome regardless of whether or not you understand exactly what is going on.

“As the police launch a full-scale crackdown on organized crime, it ignites a national yakuza struggle between the Sanno of the East and Hanabishi of the West. What started as an internal strife in Outrage has now become a nationwide war in Outrage Beyond.”

Kitano is directing from his own script, and stars (as Beat Takeshi) alongside Ryo Kase, Tomokazu Miura, Toshiyuki Nishida, Hideo Nakano, Yutaka Matsushige, and Fumiyo Kohinata.

Outrage Beyond will...

Written and directed by Takeshi Kitano.

Starring Miho Kanno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tatsuya Mihashi,

Chieko Matsubara, Kyoko Fukada and Tsutomu Takeshige.

Running time: 113 min.

Dolls is a beautiful, clever, original stylization with just the right touch of subtle irony characteristic of other Kitano’s works.

Plot

There are three stories in the movie, all of them concerning love, always futile, tragic and pierced with the feeling of loneliness.

The central story is about a young couple, Matsumoto and Sawako. They are engaged to be married, but Matsumoto is persuaded by his parents to marry the daughter of his boss. As a dutiful son, the young man respects his parents’ request: they worked hard to get him through college and give him a good chance at life.

At the wedding Matsumoto is informed that Sawako attempted suicide. She survived, but lost her mind and is now in a semi-vegetative state. Matsumoto leaves...

A man on a bicycle finds a discarded white lab coat on the road at night. Then he puts the coat on. Miwa Nishikawa's Dear Doctor makes clear from the get-go what this film is really about. It's not the looks or the credentials that makes one a doctor, it's one's heart.

Adapting from her own novel, Nishikawa, a pupil of Hirokazu Kore-eda (Maboroshi, Nobody Knows), skillfully plays out a story of an imposter. In Kamiwada, a small rural village, the sudden disappearance of their beloved doctor, Dr. Ino (Tsurube Shofukutei), who's been serving them for the last three years, leaves its mostly elderly residents in shock and disbelief. Detectives are soon frustrated with conflicting information given by the villagers with no clear picture of who Ino really is.

The film jumps back and forth between the police investigation in to the disappearance and the happier times with Dr.

[Our thanks go out to Chris MaGee and Marc Saint-Cyr at the Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow for sharing their coverage of the 2010 Nippon Connection Film Festival.]

In 2005 director Toshiaki Toyoda was poised to take his career to the next level. At that point only 35-years-old Toyoda had already gained a reputation as one of Japan's most promising filmmakers. Throughout films like "Pornostar (a.k.a. "Tokyo Rampage")", the Taiyo Matsumoto manga adaptation "Blue Spring", and the masterful ensemble prison break film "9 Souls" he showed that he could combine tongue-in-cheek comedy with brutal drama, but by mid-decade he was ready to release a film that would place him alongside the likes of international festival favorites Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda. "Hanging Garden" was an unblinking look at the disintegration of the Japanese family starring Kyoko Kozumi and Itsuji Itao as parents who demand 100% honesty from each other and their children, but who end up holding damaging secrets from each other. Not since Yoshimitsu Morita's "The Family Game" had a filmmaker presented such a damning llok at the core of Japanse society.

Glory to the Filmmaker indeed. As reported on The Auteurs yesterday, Takeshi Kitano is currently the toast of Paris, prompting Movie Poster of the Week to take a look at Kitano’s career in one-sheets. Starting as a stand-up comedian in 1972, “Beat” Takeshi soon became one of Japan’s most popular entertainers and television personalities. He started acting in movies in the early ’80s, most notably in Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) but it was almost by accident that he started making his own films, when the original director of 1989’s Violent Cop fell ill. Since then he has written and directed 14 movies in the past 20 years, though his reception in America has veered wildly from adulation to indifference. His first film to be picked up in the States, 1993’s Sonatine, was held back for years by Miramax until it was finally released five years later, hot on the...

Not exactly film news, this, but…

The Japanese are no strangers to hiring movie talents for spicing up their videogames, but Studio Level 5 (of DragonQuest fame) have taken this to, haha, the next level.

For their new RPG “Ni No Kuni: The Another World” (no typo), the animated cut-scenes will be done by Studio Ghibli. That’s quite a catch as you will agree.

And it doesn’t stop there either, for Joe Hisaishi will compose the game’s soundtrack. In case you’re wondering “Joe Who?”, well, shame on you!

He is perhaps most famous for composing the soundtracks of all of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies for the past 25 years, but he also collaborated on several movies with Takeshi Kitano like “Brother”, “Dolls”, “Kikujiro”, “Hana-Bi” and “Sonatine”. And that’s only scratching the surface!

Last week the Tokyo Game Show started, so Studio Level 5 released a trailer for “Ni...

The concluding chapter of the self relective trilogy that Japanese icon Takeshi Kitano began with Takeshis’ and continued with Glory to the Filmmaker it is hard to imagine Achilles and the Tortoise being more different than the films that came before. While both Takeshis’ and Glory were shot through with manic energy and featured Kitano playing some distorted version of himself Achilles is a far more sedate and quiet film, one that follows a conventional structure, following a single character through the course of his life, and is concerned more with the creative impulse than with any sort of self representation. If Takeshis’ was an attempt to break new stylistic ground while satirizing the media monster Kitano himself had become and Glory was a deliberate throwback to the comedic madness of Getting Any, then Achilles draws more on the meditative side of Kitano, the side responsible for films such as...

SEOUL, South Korea -- The seventh Pusan International Film Festival has unveiled a lineup boasting 228 films from 16 Asian countries and 42 Western countries, as well as special sections on independent Taiwanese cinema; Nagisa Oshima's films about Korea; and Kim Soo-yong, one of Korea's leading filmmakers. The festival, which runs Nov. 14-23 in the southern port city, has become Asia's leading film festival. The opening film will be the latest by Korea's Kim Ki-duk, The Coast Guard. The 2 billion won ($1.6 million) film stars one of Korea's hottest actors, Jang Dong-gun. The festival's closing film will by Dolls, by Japan's Takeshi Kitano. The various sections at the festival will be A Window on Asian Cinema, New Currents, Korean Panorama, World Cinema, Wide Angle, and a focus on Indian cinema.