"Actor: Hôsei Komatsu"

• Violence at High Noon | DVD | (28/07/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  One of Oshima's most powerful and controversial films. Telling the brutal story of real-life rapist and serial murderer Eisuke (Kei Sato) and his relationship with his protective schoolteacher wife Matsuko (Akiko Koyama) and his only surviving victim Shino (Saeda Kawagushi) Oshima takes the format of the 'real-life crime' drama and uses it as a canvas to lay bare the lost idealism and decay in postwar Japan. Although the action takes place in a seemingly idyllic rural setting Oshima's portrait of humanity is as dark violent and uncompromising as the urban wastes and hellish ghettos of Naked Youth and The Sun's Burial. Never presenting Eisuke as anything less than a monster Oshima goes further to suggest how such deviancy and (specifically male) violence reflects an amoral and corrupt modern society. Part thriller part reaction against the austere Japanese cinematic tradition with avant-garde experimentation and grim social commentary Violence At High Noon is fresh and as fearsome today as when it was first released.

• The Sun's Burial | DVD | (26/05/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Set in the post-war slums of Osaka The Sun's Burial follows the lives and fates of the denizens of this hellish ghetto. Pimps prostitutes drug addicts vagrants hustlers and gangsters struggle to survive amidst the poverty and decay of 1950's Japan. Unflinching in it's portrayal of life in these slums the film goes beyond a documentary-style realism to achieve a garish lurid Cinemascope aesthetic that is at once repulsive and yet mesmerising. It's a pitiless and dispassionate portrait of a living hell that lurks behind the facade of a prosperous new Japan a place where everything - food sex even blood - is simply a commodity to be stolen and sold.