Noriko (Setsuko Hara) lives in postwar Tokyo with her extended family. Although she enjoys her career and her friends, her more traditionally minded family worries about the fact that she’s still single at the advanced age of 28. When 40-year-old business associate Takako (Kuniko Igawa) proposes marriage, Noriko’s family press her into accepting. But when […]

  Slant Magazine writes about the film: The greatest shock of Sudden Rain comes when Ryotaro Namiki (Shuji Sano) declares to his wife Fumiko (Setsuko Hara) that she has no dreams. For those familiar with Hara’s typically incandescent screen presence this is less of an insult than pure blasphemy, though it’s all to director Mikio […]

Sanae (Hara Setsuko), a recent widow, has returned to the family home with a sizable sum of insurance money – an event that triggers discord in a family already coming apart at the seams. With great performances by an A-list cast, Daughters, Wives, and a Mother contrasts Sanae’s virtuous daughter against her scheming, cash-strapped, and […]

The 1953 masterpiece “Tokyo Story,” by director Yasujiro Ozu, has been voted the greatest film of all time by 358 directors around the world, in a poll released in 2012 by Sight and Sound magazine. The publication, by the British Film Institute, rated the late Ozu’s classic story of family, loss and change over other […]

Sweet Bean (Japanese: あん)is a 2015 Japanese drama film directed by Naomi Kawase. It was selected to open the Un Certain Regard section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It was also selected to be screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The film centres around Sentaro, a […]

Our Little Sister (Japanese: 海街) is a 2015 Japanese film directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, starring Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho and Suzu Hirose. It tells the story of three sisters in their 20s who live together in Kamakura, and are joined by their 14-year-old half sister after their father dies. The film is based on […]