…have I got the film for you - Profound Desires of the Gods. It’s available via the Masters of Cinema line, on Blu-ray only and restricted to play just on Region B or region-free machines so the possible audience for this release is limited. If you have those capabilities or simply want to read my [...]

Forever transforming intricate layers of sleaze into something profound, Shohei Imamura continued on the same path he’d journeyed in 1963’s The Insect Woman with its follow-up, Intentions of Murder. The 1964 film approaches many of Imamura’s favorite subjects, notably an unremarkable and unhappy woman dragged through conflict and emerging with complicated victory. The women in [...]

The fallacy of truth in cinema is as much the main subject of Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes as the investigation into the disappearance of a Japanese businessman that initially appears to be the focal point of the 1967 film. The director, whose films have been the subject of a Brooklyn retrospective the past [...]

Shohei Imamura’s breakthrough film Pigs and Battleships (translated onscreen as Hogs and Warships) is a grimy tale of the underbelly of a Japanese port town under American occupation following World War II. Released in 1961 (though not until the 1980s in the U.S., following the director’s first Palme d’Or win at Cannes for The [...]

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” [...]