Alternative Film Guide

Gion no shimai / Sisters of the Gion (1936)
Direction: Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay: Kenji Mizoguchi and Yoshikata Yoda; from Aleksandr Kuprin’s novel. Cast: Isuzu Yamada, Yôko Umemura, Benkei Shiganoya, Fumio Okura
 

Business is contingent upon profitable commercial transactions. Exchanges that removed from human instigation are cold but necessary for survival. Success, no matter strategy or plan, is [...]

Sanshô Dayû / Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Direction: Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay: Fuji Yahiro; from the old legend and Ogai Mori’s 1915 short story “Sansho the Steward.” Cast: Shindô Eitarô, Kyoko Kagawa, Yoshiaki Hanayagi
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
One of the nostra about Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi is that he is ‘the most Japanese of all filmmakers.’ [...]

"It’s almost strange that it’s the first ceremony," remarked French director Luc Besson at the 1st Asian Film Awards presentation held this evening at Hong Kong’s Convention and Exhibition Centre, as part of the 31st Hong Kong International Film Festival which kicked off last night.
"Good films come from everywhere," added Besson. "Artists are like mushrooms, [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black-and-white Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well, is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s an inapt comparison. While Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film — though a high-class melodrama — has far more relevance, realism, and complexity.
The [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Heaven. When I came across the long-awaited release of the original 1954 Japanese monster film Gojira on DVD, I thought I had struck heaven. That it was accompanied by its Americanized cousin, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, only doubled the joy of expectation. And for once, I was not disappointed. The [...]

Press Release:
Beverly Hills, CA — With 16 animated features submitted for consideration in 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences anticipates that its Animated Feature Film category, for the first time since 2002, may include a full slate of five nominees.
The 16 features expected to compete for 79th Academy Awards® nominations are:
The Ant [...]

The AFI FEST 2006, which takes off tonight at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, will screen Emilio Estevez’s Bobby as its opening-night gala presentation.
From the AFI press release:
AFI FEST 2006 presented by Audi: AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival announces that Emilio Estevez’s Bobby has been chosen as the Festival’s Opening Night Gala presentation. [...]

The 19th Tokyo International Film Festival came to a close this past Sunday, Oct. 29.
The winner of the festival’s top prize, the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix (worth US$100,000) was Michel Hazanavicius’s French box-office hit and Seattle Film Festival winner OSS 117 Le Caire nid d’espions / OSS 117, Cairo Nest of Spies, a comedy-cum-spy-thriller [...]

Eiji Okuda’s Nagai Sanpo / A Long Walk, a Japanese drama about an old man (veteran Ken Ogata) who goes out for a long stroll with a mysterious little girl, and Carlos Diegues’s O Maior Amor do Mundo / The Greatest Love of All, the story of a dying Brazilian man (José Wilker) searching for [...]

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
Some films do get better after repeated viewings. Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 black-and-white drama Shichinin no samurai / Seven Samurai is one of them. It fully deserved winning the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion, as well as two Academy awards, for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Costume Design.
On first [...]

Via the BBC: The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has ordered more than three minutes cut from Koroshiya 1 / Ichi the Killer, a Japanese film that depicts graphic scenes of "extreme sexual violence." That represents the BBFC’s biggest demand for an "editing job" in about a decade.
Described by its distributor, Medusa Pictures, [...]

Two-time Palme d’Or winner Shohei Imamura died in Tokyo on May 30. The 79-year-old Japanese filmmaker had been suffering from liver cancer.
Born in Tokyo in 1926, Imamura entered a technical school in order to avoid being drafted into Japan’s Imperial Army. His studies at the renowned Waseda University were followed by work as an assistant [...]

Operetta tanuki goten / Princess Raccoon (2005)
Director: Seijun Suzuki. Screenplay: Yoshio Urasawa. Cast: Ziyi Zhang, Jô Odagiri, Hiroko Yakushimaru, Saori Yuki
 

 
One of my two favorite films of the AFI FEST 2005 — Caché / Hidden was the other one — took me completely by surprise. Seijun Suzuki’s delightful musical fairy tale, Operetta tanuki goten [...]

This fall, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is presenting the film series "Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema from the National Film Center, Tokyo."
The series consists of fifty-three classic Japanese films made between 1929 and 1970, which have been loaned out by the National Film Center of the National Museum of [...]

Cannes Festival News:
Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai is set to star in Provoked, the story of a British woman who was convicted of murder in 1989 for setting her abusive husband on fire. Naveen Andrews will play the husband.
…
"I think that Japan is sick," said Japanese director Masahiro Kobayashi at Cannes. "There is a tendency [...]

Japan’s most acclaimed animated film director, Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle), will be honored with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 62nd Venice Film Festival in August.
The 64-year-old Miyazaki will be the first Japanese national to receive the lifetime award.
 

From January 8 through March 3, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago presents a 27-film retrospective devoted to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), who is often called "the most Japanese of Japanese directors."
Among the films to be screened are Ozu’s earliest surviving film, Days of Youth (1929), plus Tokyo Chorus (1945), Late [...]