"Actor: Shigeru Tsuyuguchi"

• A Man Vanishes (1967) (Masters of Cinema) | DVD | (24/10/2011) from £18.88   |  Saving you £1.11 (5.88%)   |  RRP £19.99

  It is difficult to summarise Shohei Imamura's legendary 1967 film, the first picture produced by Japan's countercultural Art Theatre Guild (ATG). Is it a documentary that turns into a fiction? A narrative film from beginning to end? A record of improvisation populated with actors or non-actors (and in what proportion)? Is it the investigation into a true disappearance, or a work merely inspired by actual events? Even at the conclusion of its final movement, A Man Vanishes [Ningen johatsu, or The Unexplained Disappearance of a Human Being] mirrors its subject in deflecting inquiries into the precise nature of its own being. A middle-class salaryman has gone missing - possibly of his own accord - and a film crew has set out to assemble a record of the man and the events surrounding his disappearance. As the crew meticulously builds a cachet of interviews with the man's family and lovers, their subject and his motivations become progressively more elusive - until the impossibility of the endeavour seems to transform the very film itself. Long unavailable anywhere on home video, Imamura's A Man Vanishes remains a unique and crucial entry in a provocative filmmaker's body of work, daring as it does to ask the big questions: what is reality, and what is a man?

• Sword Of Vengeance | DVD | (19/06/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Sword of Vengeance is the first of the internationally renowned Lone Wolf and Cub productions. Framed for treason the executioner of the Shogun is stripped of office and declared an outlaw. Together with his infant son he sets out as a mercenary on a blood soaked journey of revenge against the secret society that murdered his wife and robbed him of his good name. With his life in ruins and literally believing that he is in hell he and his baby son have become Lone Wolf and Cub