Hello Mister Video - Vancouver, BC

Ang Lee’s controversial, erotic espionage thriller set in Shanghai during WWII. Radiant, humble young Wang (sublime ingenue Tang Wei) has fled her village for Hong Kong during the Second World War. She joins a patriotic theatre troupe at her university, and they quickly become a tightly knit group of friends and comrades. Wang’s wrenching performances […]

Never one to settle into a genre, cult director Takashi Miike adapts Ikki Kajiwara and Hisao Maki’s homoerotic prison novel into an ambiguous drama that keeps audiences at bay with Godardian devices, but invites attention with its visual brilliance. Two new arrivals at a juvenile detention center are drawn together by their different backgrounds. Jun […]

Juzo Itami’s (Tampopo) satiric comedy of ambition, greed and the battle of the sexes. A disarming and dedicated woman tax collector meets her match in a millionaire “love hotel” tycoon and tax-evader extraordinaire. Winner of nine Japanese Academy Awards.

Syndromes and a Century is a film in two parts which sometimes echo each other. The two central characters are inspired by the film-maker’s parents, in the years before they became lovers. The first part focuses on a woman doctor, and is set in a space reminiscent of the world in which the film-maker was […]

Juzo Itami’s Minbo no Onna – a virtual textbook on how to beat yakuza harassment — was a big hit and almost got its director killed in the wake of a gangland knife-attack. Itami’s follow-up is a light-hearted meditation on death and dying, strongly recalling Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Ikiru. Buhei Mikai (Rentaro Mikuni) is a […]

Three works from perhaps the most avant-garde of the late sixties Japanese New Wave directors. Teshigahara’s debut, Pitfall (1962, 97 mins.), combines a sociorealist critique of capitalism with a thorny murder mystery. An itinerant miner (Hisashi Igawa), wandering the countryside with his young son, is hunted and brutally murdered by a mysterious assassin (Kuni Tanaka). […]

In this rousing follow-up to his 1987 hit, A Taxing Woman, Juzo Itami (Tampopo) brings back his resourceful and charming heroine, tax inspector Ryoko Itakura (described by Vincent Canby of The New York Times as “a far more endearing crime buster than Batman”) for another battle of wits against the fat cats and swindlers who […]

Coco, Tsumuji and Satoru live their lives protected from the outside world by high walls. But one day they leave their sanctuary to begin what becomes an endless journey after considering the inevitability of armageddon. A bitter-sweet tale of romance.