An exquisite and meditative biopic about a Japanese tea master who became influential with the shoguns during the 16th century as Teshigahara conflates the personal with the political in a beguiling way.
A Korean man is hanged but doesn’t die in Oshima’s complex if puzzling political farce, built out of layers of thematic juxtapositions and performative gestures, as the ghastly spectre of Japanese imperialism and social injustices rear their ugly heads.
Backed by a sublime piano score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, this Murakami adaptation about an older man with chronic loneliness and his fashion-obsessed wife lulls viewers into a quiet trance.
Works as a drinking game ‘midnight B-movie’ for cultists, this teenage-girls-visit-haunted-house psychedelic head trip entertains with its over-the-top and bewildering horror-comedy and creative special effects.
Iwai captures vividly the feeling of being nowhere and everywhere at once as his chaotic, genre-blending work of linguistic pluralism explores marginalised lives chasing their rags-to-riches story in an alternative-future Japan.
Far from the kind of erotica that masquerades as political art, Terayama’s largely uninteresting cult oddity featuring Klaus Kinski is an absurd tale of sadomasochism as a white man forces his mistress to become a prostitute to test her deep love for him.
A dress rehearsal for what would come later, this captivating early effort may be thought of as Miyazaki’s ‘Dune’—a fantasy epic with warring nations, a mythic prophecy and giant insects that also operates as a potent call to prevent the mother of all ecological disasters.
Ichikawa’s marvellous coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games is one of the all-time finest sports documentaries, at times poetic and abstract, and always interested in the bodies, faces and movements of athletes and spectators rather than who wins or loses.
A mix of avant-garde Godard and topographical Rivette, but wholly Oshima in this occasionally ponderous meta-filmic and self-reflexive take on what it means to engage politically with filmmaking as a character leaves a mysterious final reel of film after committing suicide.
Itami’s most famous film, a ramen Western, is unpredictable but electric, showing with deadpan humour how food penetrates every aspect of life.
Eternality Tan 