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Megalopolis director Francis Ford Coppola has joined Letterboxd, the social cataloguing service where members can rate and review films and keep track of what they’ve watched. I’m a little addicted. Coppola has shared a list of twenty films that he would recommend to any cinephile or aspiring filmmaker, which you can check out below.

French Cancan (Jean Renoir) The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa) The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra) Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg) The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis) The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa) Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu) The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg) Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan) Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson) Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg) Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst) A Place in the Sun (George Stevens) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese) After...

After years of countless propaganda productions orchestrated by an aggressive government with ultra-nationalistic desires, Japanese cinema started to see more of a pacifistic approach to the sensitive topic of World War II following its conclusion. Yet, plenty of filmmakers in Japan were not proud of the country's war activity and their leaders at the time. Directors like Akira Kurosawa would go on to shamefully disown the jingoistic projects that were assigned to them to make during the Second World War. Fast forward to 1952; once the American occupation was lifted, bold directors like Masaki Kobayashi, Ishiro Honda, and Kihachi Okamoto were free to make anti-war features presented on a more honest and grander scale. For filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, “The Burmese Harp” was his opportunity to express his distaste for the concept of war and his admiration for humanistic values.

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The...

Novelist Shohei Ooka would captivate readers with his anti-war novel “Fires on the Plain,” published in 1951. Inspired by his personal experiences from being drafted as a soldier, Ooka's chilling story depicts the gruesome violence and insanity that occurred during the Imperial Japanese Army's last stand in the Philippines on the island of Leyte during World War II. The award-winning book was praised for its gripping storytelling and raw examination of the horrors of war. With the success of the title, there were talks for a film adaptation for quite a while. Eventually, the nightmarish narrative would be superbly adapted for cinemas with Kon Ichikawa's “Fires on the Plain.”

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Daiei Film greenlighted the project, and the studio's president, Masaichi Nagata, would produce it. Kon Ichikawa would direct, and his wife, Natto Wada, would write the screenplay. There was initial...

By Nicholas Poly

In this article I’m going to take a peek on a double bill. The first title is Kon Ichikawa’s intriguing mystery drama ‘The Inugami Family’ aka ‘The Inugamis’, which was released back in 1976. The second one is Masato Harada’s ‘Inugami’ which was released 25 years later, in 2001.

The interesting fact is the inugami ‘effect’ itself, in both films, which is also the obvious link between the two titles. It must be stressed though, that the theme is presented from a completely different angle in each one of these features. This means that there is no apparent ‘technical’ or ‘artistic’ relation between the two films. Harada’s film is nor a remake neither some kind of ‘hommage’ on Ichikawa’s title. Each one of the films forms a cinematic universe of its own, despite the dramatic overtones and symbolisms that reflect in both features.

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“The Burmese Harp” (1956), “Fires on the Plain” (1959), “An Actor’s Revenge” (1963). Those are only a few of the internationally critically acclaimed feature films of Japanese director Kon Ichikawa. His movies depict wide-ranging topics of Japan’s society in the twentieth century and represent a versatile filmmaker that often falls short in comparison to other masters like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi.

“Youth” is screening at Japan Society

Primarily known for his fictional works, Ichikawa also produced a handful of documentaries, that had a striking impact especially in the field of sports documentary. Most significant are “Tokyo Olympiad” (1965), “Visions of Eight” (1973), and “Youth” (1968). Ichikawa uses the same approach for all of these documentaries. Focusing on the event itself and the athlete’s endurance during the competition, Ichikawa follows a melodramatic concept of pain and glory.

Three years after the monumental “Tokyo Olympiad” about the Tokyo Olympic Games, the director...

Seemingly for as long as the medium has been around, film has consistently been in conversation with and influenced by its elder sibling, theater. Be it the rather constant flood of screen adaptations of famous plays and musicals, or the actual aesthetic back and forth between the two mediums, film and theater are two vastly different outlets for artists to practice their craft within, while working vastly different muscles. However, when films attempt to blur the lines between these two worlds, some true beauty and greatness can arise. And therein lies Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge.

Set within the world of kabuki theater of the nineteenth century, Ichikawa’s film tells the story Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa), a man raised since age seven in the arts not only of theater (he is known as an onnagata, or a male actor cast in female positions) but also deadly martial arts.

Made right in the middle of the most fertile period in the career of director Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad), An Actor's Revenge joins the Criterion Collection this week as spine #912. It's a drab tale of melodrama and revenge set in 19th-century Edo, as an onnagata (a male actor playing exclusively female roles in Kabuki theatre) crafts an intricate plot of retribution against three men who drove his parents to suicide. Demure and feminine -- never dropping the guise and voice of a woman, even offstage, among intimates -- Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa) is a compellingly unique choice for a protagonist. He finds himself caught between his master, who plucked him from the tragedy of his parents' death to train him to portray...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Welcome to another edition of Over/Under Movies, the podcast in which we pick one overrated film and one underrated film — similar in tone, genre, style, or however we see fit — and we discuss them.

We’re doing things a bit differently on this chapter, as my co-host Oktay Ege Kozak has chosen three underrated or hard-to-find titles from The Criterion Collection. We start with Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 anti-war film “The Burmese Harp,” about a pacifist soldier who becomes a monk after Japan surrenders in World War II.

Continue reading Podcast: Over/Under Movies Looks At Criterion Titles ‘The Burmese Harp,’ ‘Nights Of Cabiria’ & ‘White Dog’ at The Playlist.

Some lesser-known wartime stories, such as Japan’s The Burmese Harp and the German-made Generation War, rank alongside the classics

No recent historical cataclysm has eclipsed the magnitude of the second world war. And thank God for that: the war was horrible! Its aftershocks are still felt in many current conflicts. The war touched every life differently, so it’s no wonder authors and film-makers keep returning to it, finding new stories to tell.

Related: The Zookeeper's Wife review – Jessica Chastain drama is wildly inconsistent

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Above: Italian 2-foglio for Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1965).As the 54th New York Film Festival winds to a close this weekend I thought it would be instructive to look back at its counterpart of 50 years ago. Sadly, for the sake of symmetry, there are no filmmakers straddling both the 1966 and the 2016 editions, though Agnès Varda (88 years old), Jean-Luc Godard (85), Carlos Saura (84) and Jirí Menzel (78)—all of whom had films in the 1966 Nyff—are all still making films, and Milos Forman (84), Ivan Passer (83) and Peter Watkins (80) are all still with us. There are only two filmmakers in the current Nyff who could potentially have been in the 1966 edition and they are Ken Loach (80) and Paul Verhoeven (78). The current Nyff is remarkably youthful—half the filmmakers weren’t even born in 1966 and, with the exception of Loach and Verhoeven, the old guard is now represented by Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar,...

Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, Tokyo Olympiad) was born 100 years ago today. Also in today's roundup: Melissa Anderson remembers Chantal Akerman, André Bazin and Jean Renoir on television, Girish Shambu on Gina Teleroli's Here's to the Future! and Kurt Walker's Hit 2 Pass, J. Hoberman on Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North and Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades, a roundup on Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, Laurie Anderson on Fresh Air, independent Chinese cinema in San Francisco, Soon-Mi Yoo's Songs from the North in Los Angeles, plus news of an animated feature from Edgar Wright and the latest on that sequel to Trainspotting. » - David Hudson...

Kon Ichikawa (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, Tokyo Olympiad) was born 100 years ago today. Also in today's roundup: Melissa Anderson remembers Chantal Akerman, André Bazin and Jean Renoir on television, Girish Shambu on Gina Teleroli's Here's to the Future! and Kurt Walker's Hit 2 Pass, J. Hoberman on Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North and Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades, a roundup on Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, Laurie Anderson on Fresh Air, independent Chinese cinema in San Francisco, Soon-Mi Yoo's Songs from the North in Los Angeles, plus news of an animated feature from Edgar Wright and the latest on that sequel to Trainspotting. » - David Hudson...

What makes films about religion so interesting is the way some manage to tread a line between support and criticism, while some are vehemently anti-religion or pro-religion. When all is said and done, it’s up to the audience to decide whether or not the film (or the faith portrayed) is a respectful or perceptive study on faith and the dogmatic principles that may or may not surround it. Not every religious film is uplifting. In fact, there are plenty of non-religious films that do a better job of building viewers’ faith. But that’s another list for another time.

30. Beyond the Hills (2012)

Directed by Cristian Mingiu

Five years after his punishing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Christian Mingiu delivered an interesting look at a lifelong friendship formed at an orphanage. Beyond the Hills tells the story of two women, based on non-fiction novels by Tatiana Niculescu Bran: Alina (Cristina Flutur) has fled to Germany,...

Cinema, like most arts, exists beyond time and space. They are a medium of transportation, and for most of us, our only opportunity to fulfil our deepest desires and confront our darkest fears. That’s why it seems unfair to look back on a year in film and focus only on new releases. Our year end obsession with best of lists extends far beyond our desire to compartmentalize cinema into qualitative categories, but reflects an innate desire to understand and communicate with the world. We look at the list of our favourite critics to better understand who they are, and make our own lists in the hopes of finding hidden meaning in our own lives. We use these lists as emblems of who we are and what we are thinking. These desires may not lie quite on the surface, but there is no denying they fuel – at least in part – our compulsion for list making.

Panaji, Nov 20: A new section celebrating Asian spiritualism through cinema has been launched with the 43rd International Film Festival of India (Iffi) that got off to a rousing start here Tuesday.

Films like "The Buddha, Light of Asia", "Samsara", "Mystic Iran: The Unseen World", "The Burmese Harp" and "The Great Pilgrim" will be screened under this section titled Soul of Asia: Cinema and Mysticism.

"The vision is to screen India premieres of films made on themes of Asian philosophies and philosophers, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen, Confucianism, Sufism and other ancient mystic and ascetic traditions of Asia," said the.

Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial was a sidebar at this year's New York Film Festival that Dan Sallitt, writing a couple of weeks ago, found "so exciting that it threatens to overshadow the main slate: a retrospective of the Japanese studio Nikkatsu, whose opportunistic shifts of focus always seemed to open doors for some of Japan's most creative filmmakers. Compare film magazine Kinema Junpo's 1999 and 2009 lists of all-time greatest Japanese films to the Lincoln Center series schedule, and count the overlaps." Last year in the Notebook, Dan reviewed one of the 37 films in the series, Tomu Uchida's Earth (1939).

"The sidebar is peppered with nearly impossible to see rediscoveries," notes Steve Dollar at GreenCine Daily: "early silent films like 1927's A Diary of Chuji's Travels and harshly realistic World War II dramas like Mud and Soldiers. Shot on location in China in 1939, the latter film blends...

This week on the podcast, Ryan and Travis are joined by David Blakeslee from the Criterion Reflections blog, to discuss the week's news, Criterion Collection new releases, as well as Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp. This marks the end of their "war arc" of August, and next week they'll cover Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up for the first in their "meta arc".

Los Angeles (Reuters) - "My Week with Marilyn," starring Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams as 1950s sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, will see its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in October, organizers said on Thursday.

Directed by Simon Curtis, the film is based on a week that British writer Colin Clark worked as an assistant with Monroe while she was filming "The Prince and the Showgirl" in the United Kingdom in the early summer of 1956.

That film featured Monroe working opposite Sir Laurence Oliver and was shot when Monroe was on a honeymoon with her husband, playwright Arthur Miller. When he left England, Clark was assigned to introduce Monroe to British life.

"My Week with Marilyn" is based on a diary Clark kept, excerpts of which were published in two books in 1995 and 2000. Along with Williams, the movie also stars Kenneth Branagh as Olivier, Dougray Scott as Miller and Dame Judi Dench.

Michelle Williams-starring biopic about phenomenal actress-singer Marilyn Monroe, "My Week with Marilyn", is set to be premiered at the New York Film Festival. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced on Thursday, August 4 that the movie will have its special screening on Sunday, October 9 during the event.

On why they chose to include "Marilyn" in the prestigious festival, Richard Pena, selection committee chair and program director of the society explained, "After seeing Marilyn Monroe so often portrayed in films as a caricature, it is a pleasure to see this complex personality and unique on-screen presence portrayed so well by such a talented actress Michelle Williams."

Directed by Simon Curtis, "My Week with Marilyn" is based on Colin Clark's diaries, in which he documented the interaction between Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier during the making of 1956's movie "The Prince and the Showgirl". The film chronicles a week...

News continues to trickle in about this year's New York Film Festival, the 49th (September 30th through October 16th). So, yes, expect 2012's festival to pull out all the stops to honor its own 50th birthday. We always cover this festival since its the easiest for The Film Experience, being NYC based, but this year we're aiming to do thrice the amount of our usual coverage. Stay tuned.

Here's what we know so far.

Opening Night ~ Roman Polanski's Carnage

Centerpiece ~ Simon Curtis's  My Week With Marilyn (World Premiere)

Closing Night & Lineup In General ~ Tba... though it's usually selections that previously debuted at Cannes or Toronto. The Skin I Live In is frequently rumored.

The Burmese Harp (1956)Masterworks ~ This is the section where they show old films, rare prints and retrospectives.

This year they'll be screening a restored and aspect-ratio corrected print of William Wyler's much-Oscar'ed Epic Ben-hur...

"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."

Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...

The Criterion Collection continues its love affair with the great filmmakers of Japan with the upcoming release of Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters on Blu-ray and DVD on June 14.

The Makioka Sisters comes to vivid life in Criterion's new edition.

A lyrical adaptation of the beloved Japanese novel by Junichiro Tanizak, The Makioka Sisters was a late-career triumph for Ichikawa, who’s best known for his films The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959) and the 1965 documentary Tokyo Olympiad.

Revolving around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki) follows the lives of four sisters who have taken on their family’s kimono manufacturing business, over the course of a number of years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds a husband.

It is kind of thrilling to see that the ever-exemplary U.K.-based Eureka!/Masters of Cinema label is so bullish on the Blu-ray disc format. July and August were big Blu-ray months for the label, seeing the releases in that format of two titles previously unavailable from the label: Jia Zhangke's The World and Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp—and two high-definition updates of previous Eureka!/Moc releases: Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine and Rene Laloux's La planete sauvage.

All of these releases are highly noteworthy, but my selection of the Laloux film for this review is not entirely arbitrary. First off, there's the matter of the material upgrade in and of itself. The standard-def edition of La planete sauvage, a.k.a. Fantastic Planet, spine number 34 in the Eureka!/Moc series, released in 2006, was created from an interlaced master. The DVD was nonetheless very beautiful. Created at...

It’s not a war! It’s just killing.

We’re just about halfway through August and in some parts of the world kids are getting ready to go back to school, a lot of vacations have run their course and folks are already making plans for Labor Day. In other words – summer is almost over! (That is, in the northern hemisphere…) So for this week’s Eclipse column, I figured I better find a summer movie to review while there’s still time. And I’ve landed on the perfect choice: Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, from Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties. Besides the obvious seasonal theme indicated in the title, I figure this is a good title to review for a few other reasons.

Judging from the accounts of recent acquisitions I’ve seen from last month’s Barnes & Noble sale, the Oshima box...

Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love The Ten Commandments: Most Important Religion Films of All Time The first film on the Film Snobbery list not featuring Judeo-Christian issues is, at #14, Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960), which deals with "the tragic implications of religious obsession in this dark drama of a man who believes his young daughter is an incarnation of a Hindu goddess." Among the few "other religion" films on the list are Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love (2007), about the obstacles gays face in Islamic countries; Kon Ichikawa’s anti-war drama The Burmese Harp (1955), in which a World War II Japanese soldier adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk (we should have more such soldiers in real [...]...

Today is the 109th anniversary of one Chester Gould the creator of Dick Tracy. Every time Dick Tracy (1990) comes up, I think "you should watch that movie again!" but I never do. I think I'm still mad that Warren Beatty kept cutting away from Madonna's "More" performance... which should've easily been one of the best movie musical numbers of the 90s (sigh). Otherwise I quite like the movie

Trivia Alert! Dick Tracy is one of Oscar's two favorite comic book movies along with The Dark Knight (2008). Their Oscar track was very similar. Dick Tracy had 7 nominations and 3 wins. The Dark Knight had 8 nominations and 2 wins and in mostly the same categories, too.

Supporting Actor (both, and the only two comic book performances ever nominated*: Al Pacino and Heath Ledger, winner)

Cinematography (both)

Art Direction (both)

Costume Design (Dick Tracy only)

Sound (both)Sound Editing (The Dark Knight only,...

• Japanese Director, Kon Ichikawa, who many critics considered to be equally as important and influential as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, died last Wednesday in Tokyo at the age of 92. An extraordinarily prolific director, Ichikawa has made over 80 films in varying genres--ranging from thrillers to dark comedies; cartoons to war-films, including many literary adaptations and numerous collaborations with his wife, Natto Wada, as screenwriter. For this edition of Weekend Rental, I would like to recommend IchiKawa’s 1956 Academy Award nominated anti-war film, The Burmese Harp, which tells the story of a group of Japanese soldiers positioned in Burma at the end of WWII, who are asked by the British to convince a resistant regiment to surrender. The mission goes awry and soldier, Shoji Yasui, presumed dead, must make his way back to his fellow soldiers by donning the robe of a Buddhist Monk. Yasui, making his way across a war-scarred land littered with casualties,

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