Japanese
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Oh Lucy!
Oh Lucy! is a deliciously funny black comedy that takes aim at the stereotypes of two different cultures and in which you simply cannot help fall more than a little in love with the seemingly sad sack of a protagonist. Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is a middle-aged unmarried office worker in some anonymous Tokyo Office in…
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Boys For Sale
One of the most surprising facts to come out of first time filmmaker Itako’s intriguing documentary about the whole culture of young Japanese rent boys, is that they were also so relatively normal and matter-a-fact about their profession that they had all chosen as an easy way to make money. Most of the 10 boys…
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Close Knit
Japanese writer/director Naoko Ogigami’s latest movie is a delightfully sensitive family story that puts a refreshing slant on the continuing dialogue about the transgender community that is the focus of more and more films these days. 11-year-old Tomo (an enchanting and rather sanguine Rin Kakihara) has a single-parent mother who has a habit of suddenly…
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Funeral Parade of Roses
This is a re-issue of the seminal edgy Japanese arthouse movie from 1969 that for a very long time was unavailable in the U.S. even though is was one of major influence for Stanley Kubrick when he made A Clockwork Orange. It is very loosely based on the ancient Greek legend of Oedipus (the…
