Shoplifters paints a portrait of a makeshift family of outcasts living on the outskirts of Tokyo. Visual rhymes and gags echo Ernst Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedy and Harold Lloyd’s ludic humour; the theme of student romance during a skiing trip places it within the boom of Japanese student sports movies (and under the influence of its Hollywood equivalent); and the panoramic mountain landscapes resonate with the popular German mountain films of the time. Let’s smudge the lines a little and admit that while the list below offers all killer and no filler, we also wanted to make sure that a fuller richness of Japanese cinema was represented, and so only in rare cases does a single director have more than one or two films included. Read on to learn about the 17 Best Japanese Horror Movies of All Time. The greatest global cinema on demand. Nevertheless, given the national industry’s output at a time of governmental control over it, and the dearth of titles ever circulated abroad or surviving to this day from the Pacific War years, we should certainly consider this celebration of Japan’s military might as the most historically significant and, by some definitions, ‘best’ of 1942. The story of four ageing geishas as they struggle to make ends meet in post-war Japan, from acclaimed filmmaker Mikio Naruse. This monumental crime thriller, adapted from a novel by Tsutomu Minakami, opens with the recreation of a real-life typhoon that in 1954 sent the ferry between Hokkaido and the Japanese mainland plunging to the bottom of the sea with much loss of life. Amid a war between Taiwanese Triads and Japanese Yakuza, a mixed-race cop hunts a psychotic criminal who traffics in children's organs. On 11 May 2020, the BFI launched BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 Years of Japanese Cinema; a celebration of Japanese cinema that holds significant educational potential for young people of all ages.Check out more details below as well as some great input from our Youth Advisory Council on their favourite Japanese films! It’s a body swap comedy that’s ripe with quirky moments and nostalgic sentiment, following Kazuo and Kazumi as they find themselves trapped in the other’s body and forced to navigate society’s rigid gender norms. Children's Film Foundation COI Films GPO Film unit Collections The Criterion Collection BFI Flare: LGBTIQ+ Film Festival 2021 Artists' Film & Video Collections & Boxsets Rare, Deleted & Signed BFI Shop Spring Sale Books. Working in vital partnership with his wife and star, Mariko Okada, he realised a sequence of films probing themes of politics and transgressive sexuality. 8 is a film that gouged out the dark side of women’s history in Japan. Service. As in Perfect Blue (1997) and Millennium Actress (2001), Kon is interested in the relationships between identity, dreams and media, making this an eerily suitable cap to the animator’s idiosyncratic career. Reflecting dark issues in contemporary Japanese society, it poses provocative questions of the nature of good and evil. Most striking, however, is Ozu’s appropriation of Frank Borzage’s silent weepie 7th Heaven (1927). Mixing fiction with non-fiction, Kusano defies chronological order, editing the many rehearsed scenes together for us to pinpoint the subtle changes in the actors’ performances. Set in Japan’s 19th-century theatre world, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is Mizoguchi’s most precious pre-war film, and one of his masterpieces. Although less well-known in the west than his contemporaries Ozu and Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse was a major figure of Japan’s golden age. 2 July 2018. “BFI Player Classics brings together a collection of British films – the cinematic DNA of the UK – that is essential for anyone who wants to see and understand the best of British film,” said Robin Baker, Head Curator at the BFI National Archive. Instead, he provides an assured and insightful account of the moment the turbulent world of 1960s political activism turned toxic. Please download the latest version of the BFI Player app (3.4), AirPlay is now enabled and casting functionality has been improved. Stylish and compelling, the film is both a moving drama and an intelligent study of Japan’s postwar transition. ... BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 years of Japanese cinema. www.bfi.org.uk/lists/best-japanese-film-every-year-from-1925-now GOM Media Player is a free and open-source application that is used for playing a video. It was a game changer for the legendary actor Ken Takakura, previously typecast for his roles in Toei-produced yakuza films of the 60s (including our 1965 choice, A Fugitive from the Past). Rent the latest releases, subscribe to classics and explore the best from the BFI, national and regional archives. The 64 th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express has announced the full programme of its reimagined and innovative new 2020 offering that will be delivered both virtually and via physical screenings. Profiling one of the great directors of World Cinema, Wim Wenders delivers this moving portrait of Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu. It doesn’t take long to realise just why this is considered one of Studio Ghibli’s best – and one of the great films of the then new millennium. All these elements are much in evidence in his electrifying masterpiece of Japanese silent cinema set in the cosmopolitan port city of Yokohama, featuring two mixed-race Japanese schoolgirls, Sunako and Dora, whose friendship is put under strain by the appearance of a motorcycle-riding charmer named Henry. Period drama1964102 minsDirector: Kaneto Shindo. It’s an emotionally dense work, but a very approachable one nonetheless, its relatable emotivity bolstered by an all-time great score by Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator Joe Hisaishi. This deliciously wicked satire on the new cut-throat competitiveness of the postwar corporate world depicts the employees of three rival confectionary companies and their efforts to outdo one another with a series of increasingly ambitious, not to mention ludicrous, promotional campaigns. Its central figure is Yuichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki), a young working-class loner suffering from a traumatic childhood, who meets Mitsuyo (Eri Fukatsu), a shop assistant, through an online dating site. It was two years before the film saw a release in the UK, when The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw hailed it as one of the year’s best: “the moving and deeply satisfying work of a director who just keeps on getting better”. Yoko Umemura plays her conservative sister, but neither rebellion nor conformity offers much hope. Critic Mark Schilling has compared the film to Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as a work, “in which the fantastic and the supernatural not only impinge on the everyday, but poetically coexist with it – and finally supersede it.”. (We begin in 1925 for reasons of both manageability and availability: so many of Japan’s very early features are lost or remain difficult to see.). A hilariously hideous ogre rescues a feisty princess in Shrek, meets his royal in-laws in Shrek 2, rules the kingdom in Shrek the Third, and finds his world turned upside … The extraordinary performances of Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama, and the haunting sounds of their physical work accompanied with the cyclical music score by Hikaru Hayashi, make of The Naked Island an intense sensorial experience. Once heard, never forgotten. Explore Sight & Sound. His signature work, this witty, relaxed and irreverent film unfolds in and around a brothel on the road west from Edo (today’s Tokyo). Dancing provides Sugiyama the kind of joy that had always eluded him, and this uplifting story of reinvention turned out to be hugely appealing to audiences worldwide, making it a substantial hit. It struck a nerve with the public, causing riots and becoming the most commercially successful Japanese film of the silent era. Sequels became a franchise, and an American remake followed, while Nakata freaked us all out again with Dark Water in 2002. His debut Annyong Kimchi (1999) explored his Japanese-Korean identity, while Live Tape (2009) – a zero-budget, one-camera, one-take, one DV-tape concert film of musician Kenta Maeno – won a major award at the 2009 Tokyo International Film Festival. Posted on January 27, 2016 October 6, 2019 by Joao Braga. Shimazu’s influence on the Japanese cinema cannot be overstated: Heinosuke Gosho, Shiro Toyoda, Kozaburo Yoshimura, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yuzo Kawashima all served as his assistants, and he fostered a realist tradition that remains central to Japanese film art. The relentless, hypnotic throb of his playing and inventive use of 3D contribute to this overwhelming sensory portrait of a man frozen in the moment. Constrained by the draconian Film Law, which imposed restrictions on content and expression, Japanese cinema faced profound ideological challenges in the early 1940s. Superstar Koji Yakusho had himself worked as a municipal clerk before taking up an acting career, so was a good fit for the role of Sugiyama, the deskworker who glimpses a beautiful woman (real-life ballerina Tamiyo Kusakari) giving social dance lessons from the window of his commuter train and decides that he too must learn to waltz. Director: Buntaro Futagawa. Some of the most popular American horror movies are remakes of Japanese originals, and there’s a good reason for that: Films like Ringu (later remade as The Ring) and Ju-on: The Grudge (later remade as The Grudge) are truly terrifying.To make sure we all get some use out of our night lights, we’re spotlighting 10 bone-chilling Japanese horror movies. Through a subtle dissection of the ‘improvised’ family unit, Koreeda’s nuanced psychological tale, full of complexity, reveals that all is not what it seems, as the director ventures to reflect a darker side of modern Japan. Although less celebrated in the west than contemporaries such as Oshima and Imamura, Yoshishige (aka Kiju) Yoshida is one of the outstanding figures of the New Wave. Its non-judgemental, carefully observant approach was to prove typical of Hani, who was to go on to realise a series of intricate dramas on themes of female emancipation and adolescent psychology, and to explore themes of culture clash in films set in Kenya and Peru. It’s a densely plotted 20-year narrative of political manoeuvres, vendettas, mis- and displaced loyalties, face-stamping and arm-slicing – all delivered via Fukasaku’s ultra-violent, handheld stylistic blitzkrieg. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion. Written, directed and co-produced by Kaneto Shindo (later known for the terrifying Onibaba,1964), the film advanced the full bloom of Japanese avant-garde cinema in the 1960s and its fascination with the vulnerability of human life and the ‘primitive’. still has a sprightly, modern feel to it, following the daughter Kimiko (played by Sachiko Chiba, who later became Naruse’s wife) as she goes looking for the dad she’s convinced is living in embarrassing squalor. As for why, the question is momentarily left unanswered. It traces the doomed love story between a spoiled young kabuki actor (Shotaro Hanayagi) and a nanny (Kakuko Mori) who sacrifices everything for her lover’s career, while he casually takes her kindness and devotion as his due. Chief among these is Miyazaki’s dreamy love of fighter planes, complicated by the grim reality of their usage (a theme he revisits in 2013’s The Wind Rises). Mizoguchi perfected his early style, reliant on long shot and long take, with an often static camera, and delivered his social analysis with concision, force, rigour and scalpel-like precision. Following an Italian fighter pilot cursed to live as a pig after the First World War, its plot may appear simple compared with much of his filmography, but there are complex emotions at its heart. It revolves around the fears and interactions of the all-female inhabitants of a geisha house in Kyoto’s Gion district while they batten down the hatches as the civil war leading to the Meiji Restoration reaches their front door. Most of these Japanese titles have subtitles and some are also dubbed in English. Porco Rosso stands as one of veteran animator Hayao Miyazaki’s more straightforward adventures, but that’s part of its greatness. Representative of the socially conscious ‘tendency films’ of the 1920s and 30s in Japan during a boom in Marxist ideas (Kenji Mizoguchi’s Metropolitan Symphony and Tomu Uchida’s A Living Puppet, both 1929, are other examples), Shigeyoshi Suzuki’s masterpiece showcases not simply the capitalist exploitation of the working class, but a series of the heroine’s struggles with a variety of oppressors. This intimate portrait of the woman Kawase calls “grandmother”, who raised her when her parents disappeared, contains a pun on the words katatsumuri (‘snail’) and tsumori (‘intention’), playing on a childhood misunderstanding that slugs, like herself, were really snails looking for their homes. Drama195389 minsDirector: Teinosuke Kinugasa. Director Hiroshi Inagaki imbued the film with convincing period atmosphere and elicited a superb central performance from Tsumasaburo Bando. While little known in the west until Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951, Japanese cinema is now regarded as one of the great canons of world film. Set in a 2019 dystopian Neo-Tokyo built upon the ruins of the 1988 massacred Tokyo, the popular animated Japanese film dives into the controversy of atomic bombs, and top secret ESP experiments on children. Enjoy BFI at home with thousands of free films from the BFI National Archive, alongside a programme of special events and contemporary and classic cinema on BFI Player. A psychological crime thriller in jidaigeki costumes, this tale of truth and lies led to the term ‘the Rashomon effect’ – referring to the relativity of truth by which witnesses may produce contradictory accounts of events. From the samurai thrillers of Kurosawa to the beautiful melodramas of Naruse, this collection celebrates the extraordinary diversity of Japanese cinema. The whole enterprise looks set to be brought to its knees, however, when the younger of the pair rebuffs her romantic advances, prompting her to capitalise on her newfound public popularity and go it alone. Our interest here, alongside a bit of fun, is to show just how fertile that soil has proven to be. Mark reviews Ingmar Bergman’s best-known film, the brilliant allegorical drama The Seventh Seal starring Max von Sydow. Ozu’s most well-known work, Tokyo Story is among Japan’s most internationally acclaimed releases – being voted the third greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, among many other accolades. Itami followed it up a year later with the equally engaging ‘ramen western’ Tampopo, a hilarious parody that sends up the conspicuous consumption of the Bubble era. It’s the weekend of Valentine’s Day, so what better than to suggest a little bit of unromantic counter-programming? Another pre-millennial J-horror release that plunged a stake of fear and shock into the hearts of cinemagoers worldwide, it finds a director whose stories often involve men decapitating each other in a rare, quasi-feminist mood. Founded in 1933, the BFI is a registered charity governed by Royal Charter and our role is to: Curate and present the greatest international public programme of world cinema for BFI Player’s films fall into one of three categories: free, subscription, or rental. Yuzo Kawashima is the missing link between the classic Japanese cinema and the 1960s New Wave. Its similarly slight narrative unfolds as a series of comic vignettes set to rousing military songs as the eponymous hero, born from a peach in a Japanese folktale, oversees the battle preparations of his airborne and seaborne squadrons of pheasants, monkeys, rabbits, dogs and other animals. Registered charity 287780, Sign up for all the latest news from BFI Player.