"Actor: Yoko Sugi"

• Hana-Bi | DVD | (19/02/2001) from £13.59   |  Saving you £6.40 (47.09%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The ideal starter movie for those who wish to familiarise themselves with the work of the paradoxical Japanese auteur, Hana-Bi (the word means "fireworks" in Japanese) is an echt example of "Beat"'s Takeshi Kitano's distinctive brand of existential crime thrillers. Like Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine or his LA-set Brother, Hana-Bi juxtaposes shocking bursts of violence with reflective moments of lyricism, setting up a slap-caress-slap rhythm that's as disquieting as it is addictive. Kitano himself plays weary Tokyo cop Nishi, an impassive-faced detective in hock to yakuza mobsters, toughened by a career in violence (at one point he takes out an attacker's eye with a chopstick, an assault so swiftly edited one barely has time to register it). Nishi's Achilles-heel is his love for his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto) who is dying of cancer, following their late daughter to the grave. When Nishi leaves a stakeout to attend to her in hospital, a colleague, Horibe (Ren Osugi) is paralysed in the ensuing shootout. Nishi, guilt-stricken, goes on the run with Miyuki, taking her to beauty spots to enjoy simple pleasures like kite-flying and picnics before she dies, although the yakuza are never far behind. Meanwhile, Horibe takes up painting, and discovers in the process a calming new vocation (the na&239;ve, disturbing and strangely beautiful images are by Kitano himself, painted after he had his own near-fatal experience in a motorcycle accident). The cumulative effect is a profoundly moving and enigmatic movie, one that discreetly withholds many of the narrative crutches--backstory, motivation--you would expect from a conventional Hollywood movie with the same story. It's not surprising Kitano is so drawn to characters teeming with contradictions, given that his own career seems so bi-polar on paper: he started out a television presenting clown, and his move into glowering policiers represented an image volte-face as surprising to Japanese audiences as it would be if Dale Winton had started making Scorsese-style gangster movies. His comic sensibility shines through in spots in Hana-Bi, even more so in the broad comedy Kikujiro. Considered by many critics Kitano's best film, Hana-Bi^'s power is augmented by Hideo Yamamoto's lapidary cinematography, and Jo Hisaishi's lush, string-laden score. --Leslie Felperin

• Dolls | DVD | (24/11/2003) from £9.32   |  Saving you £10.67 (114.48%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Dolls is a film of extraordinary beauty and tenderness from a filmmaker chiefly associated with grave mayhem and deadpan humor. That is to say, this is not one more Takeshi Kitano movie focused on stoical cops or gangsters. The title refers most directly, but not exclusively, to the theatrical tradition of Bunraku, enacted by half-life-size dolls and their visible but shrouded onstage manipulators. Such a performance--a drama of doomed lovers--occupies the first five minutes of the film, striking a keynote that resonates as flesh-and-blood characters take up the action. The film-proper is dominated by the all-but-wordless odyssey of a susceptible yuppie and the jilted fiancée driven mad by his desertion to marry the boss's daughter. Bound by a blood-red cord, they move hypnotically through a landscape variously urban and natural, stylized only by the breathtaking purity of light, angle, color, and formal movement imposed by Kitano's compositional eye and rigorous, fragmentary editing. Along the way we also pick up the story of an elderly gangster, haunted by memories of the lover he deserted three decades earlier and generations of "brothers" for whose deaths he was, in the accepted order of things, responsible. Another strand is added to the imagistic weave via a doll-like pop singer and a groupie blinded by devotion to her. This is a film in which character, morality, metaphysics, and destiny are all expressed through visual rhyme and startling adjustments of perspective. It sounds abstract--and it is--but it's also heartbreaking and thrilling to behold. Kitano isn't in it, but as an artist he's all over it. His finest film, and for all its exoticism, his most accessible. --Richard T. Jameson

• Mikio Naruse - Three Films | DVD | (04/12/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £49.99

  Presented here in a lavish box set along with an accompanying book the Masters Of Cinema series presents three of Mikio Naruse's finest films Repast (1951) depicts the lives of common people in this instance to capture the pungent atmosphere of fading love. Set shortly after World War II and concerning a struggling marriage between salaryman Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara) and his wife Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) it focuses on the emotional crisis of the bored housewife. The repetitive tedium of her domestic life is brought into focus by a visit from Hatsunosuke's niece Satoko (Yukiko Shimazaki ) on whom Hatsunosuke lavishes much attention. Adapted from a novel by Kawabata Yasunari the first Japanese author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature Sound Of The Mountain (1954) is one of Naruse's best-known and most respected films typifying his preferred genre of shomin-geki (films about the daily lives of ordinary people). Set in the ancient seaside town of Kamakura Kawabata's home the film depicts the increasingly close relationship between a childless young woman Kikuko (Setsuko Hara) and her father-in-law Shingo (So Yamamura) to whom she turns as her own marriage to the neglectful and philandering Shuichi (Ken Uehara) disintegrates. The more Shuichi destroys his marriage the closer Shingo and Kikuko become. The third film Flowing directed in 1956 (the year that prostitution was outlawed in Japan) explores the inner workings of a changing world as traditional geishas faced the impending decline of their hidden way of life and the looming spectre of prostitution. It depicts the story of a widow Rika (Kinuyo Tanaka) who is forced to work for a living and becomes a maid in a struggling Tokyo geisha house where Tsutayakko (Isuzu Yamada ) its proud mistress tries to save the house from becoming either a restaurant or a brothel. It is through Rika a surrogate for the viewer that we are introduced to the various geishas who drink and fight worry over the lack of clients and attempt to stave off imminent extinction.