Sisters of the Gion
Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 film, Sisters of the Gion (Japanese: 祇園の姉妹), tells the story of two sisters working as geisha in the pleasure...
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The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen) is a 2006 German film and one of the very best movies I've watched this year....
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A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories
A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2005) is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Donald Richie. Richie was an authority on...
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Breathless
Breathless (French: À bout de souffle) is a film you can't press the pause button on; it demands from the viewer no interruptions, lest...
3 min read
Star
Star (1960), recently translated into English for a release in April of this year, is a novella by Yukio Mishima written in the first...
2 min read
Afraid to Die
Afraid to Die (Japanese: (からっ風野郎, or A Man Blown by the Wind) is a raunchy potboiler of a yakuza movie directed by Yasuzo Masumura and...
1 min read
Late Chrysanthemums
Late Chrysanthemums (Japanese: 晩菊, Bangiku) is a 1954 film directed by Mikio Naruse. During tough times after the war, four retired...
2 min read
2046
I finally got around to watching 2046 (2004), the third film in Wong Kar-wai's loosely connected trilogy, following Days of Being Wild...
1 min read
A Gentleman in Moscow
Surely among the best written books so far this century, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles is an upbeat and uplifting story...
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Seven Samurai
For this 100th blog post, I revisited Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) after not seeing it for a quarter century. I've watched...
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Out of the Past
I've watched a hundred or so noir films since I set out to explore the genre in January 2018, and on my list I finally got to Out of the...
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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
What an unusual movie, not least because all of it takes place in a single room. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) is a German...
2 min read
Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts
Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (乙女ごころ三人姉妹) is a 1935 drama directed by Mikio Naruse and produced by Toho Company Ltd., the company's...
3 min read
Journey Without Maps
Journey Without Maps (1936) is Graham Greene's account of his travels as a young man in Liberia, a one-month walk north to south through...
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Paisan
Paisan (Italian: Paisà) is a 1946 neorealist war drama directed by Roberto Rossellini. It's the second film in his war trilogy (after...
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Rome Open City
Another classic film by Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta) (1945) is part of the director's neorealist war trilogy,...
1 min read
Germany, Year Zero
Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero) is a 1948 film directed by Roberto Rossellini. I'd seen it before, in the 90s, and recently I...
1 min read
After the Quake
After the Quake (published in Japan in 2000 and in English in 2002) by Japanese author Haruki Murakami is a collection of six short...
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Ace in the Hole
Ace in the Hole (1951) (renamed The Big Carnival before its release) is a film noir starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Billy Wilder...
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E-Team
E-Team (2014) is an interesting documentary co-directed by Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman and centered on four members of the...
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