Ugetsu (1953)
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Nanami Hoshino, a wealthy entrepreneur, marries Korean potter Kim Jun-ho, and they both live a seemingly happy life. Then, one year after their marriage, Nanami is killed by a biker on her way home. This tragedy leaves Jun-ho completely devastated. At the hospital, Nanami's ghost arises from her body, and upon meeting a ghost child, she realizes that she is a ghost whose presence cannot be seen. She then realizes that her death was no coincidence and Jun-ho is in imminent danger. Unable to communicate with normal humans, Nanami seeks help from the elderly psychic Unten in hopes of saving Jun-ho's life.
Harry Kilmer returns to Japan after several years in order to rescue his friend George's kidnapped daughter - and ends up on the wrong side of the Yakuza, the notorious Japanese mafia...
When an American is murdered in a Japanese inn, Tokyo police detective Munesue follows the trail of the killer to New York. There he is joined by a New York City detective named Shuftan and together they sort out the crime.
This feature-length special consists of three interwoven stories. In a mysterious and remote snowy outpost, Matt and Potter share a Christmas meal, swapping creepy tales of their earlier lives in the outside world. Matt is a charismatic American trying to bring the reserved, secretive Potter out of his shell. But are both men who they appear to be?
Returning for his fifth year of study at the venerable Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the ever-maturing Harry Potter is stunned to find that his warnings about the return of Lord Voldemort have been ignored. Left with no choice, Harry takes matters into his own hands, training a small group of students -- dubbed "Dumbledore's Army" -- to defend themselves against the dark arts.
All Cassie Nightingale (Catherine Bell) wants for her birthday is for her family and friends to be together. While her husband Jake (Chris Potter) suggests an intimate dinner at a fancy restaurant in their hometown of Middleton, Cassie would rather have a party at The Grey House, with all her loved ones in attendance. And since Jake's kids, Brandon (Matthew Knight) and Lori (Hannah Endicott-Douglas), are growing up with lives of their own, it might be their last chance to unite as a family for a long time. As Cassie's special day is fast approaching, Lori discovers disturbing parallels between Cassie and Cassie's great aunt, nicknamed the Grey Lady, who disappeared at her own birthday party years before. With signs of a curse looming over her, it's clear that Cassie needs to conjure up more than a little magic to make things right again. Is there birthday magic in the air or is it a birthday curse?
Cassie Nightingale (Bell) finds herself with only days to plan her stepson Brandon's (Knight) wedding to Tara (Leggat) when the happy couple unexpectedly pushes up the date for their big day. Meanwhile, Martha (Disher), the newly elected mayor of Middleton has roped her into chairing the silent auction to raise much-needed funds for her pet project, the Middleton Botanical Gardens. Audrey (Wilson), a new arrival in town, pops in to Cassie's store Bell, Book & Candle and the two instantly bond. Needing help in the store, Cassie immediately hires Audrey as her new store associate and she even pitches in and helps Cassie organize the auction. But, Audrey is hiding a secret past and suspicions start to swirl around her when the donated auction items are missing. With the use of her "special" powers - as well as some teamwork by the Mayor and Jake (Potter), her husband and local Chief of Police - Cassie hopes to conjure up the truth before it's too late.
George Bailey has spent his entire life giving of himself to the people of Bedford Falls. He has always longed to travel but never had the opportunity in order to prevent rich skinflint Mr. Potter from taking over the entire town. All that prevents him from doing so is George's modest building and loan company, which was founded by his generous father. But on Christmas Eve, George's Uncle Billy loses the business's $8,000 while intending to deposit it in the bank. Potter finds the misplaced money, hides it from Billy, and George's troubles begin.
In 1600, nobleman Orlando (Tilda Swinton) inherits his parents' house, thanks to Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp), who commands the young man to never change. After a disastrous affair with Russian princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), Orlando looks for solace in the arts before being appointed ambassador to Constantinople in 1700, where war is raging. One morning, Orlando is shocked to wake up as a woman and returns home, struggling as a female to retain her property as the centuries roll by.
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Harry, Ron and Hermione return to Hogwarts for a third adventure and magic filled year in this follow-up to the first two Potter blockbusters. Harry comes face to face with danger yet again, this time in the form of escaped convict Sirius Black. In a bid for help, Harry turns to sympathetic Professor Lupin -- but will it be enough?
Young wizard Harry Potter starts his fourth year at Hogwarts, competes in the treacherous Tri-Wizard Tournament and faces the evil Lord Voldemort. Friends Ron and Hermione help Harry manage the pressure ⦠but Voldemort lurks, awaiting his chance to destroy Harry and all that he stands for.
Everyone's favorite novice wizard, Harry Potter, continues his high-flying adventures at Hogwarts. This time around, Harry ignores warnings not to return to school - that is, if he values his life - to investigate a mysterious series of attacks with Ron and Hermione.
Tokyo, Winter. Despite the use of the Youth Ordinance Bill to enforce curfews for minors and regulate the use of the Internet, young people continue to fight for their own freedom through underground methods. One such group calls themselves Surat. They have decided to take on Fumito Nanahara, a man who has great influence on the political world, and basically controls Tokyo with an iron fist. While using the Internet as a weapon to discover more information about Fumito, they learn about "Tower", the secret organization behind Fumito which engages in human experimentation.
Harry Potter has lived under the stairs at his aunt and uncle's house his whole life. But on his 11th birthday, he learns he's a powerful wizard -- with a place waiting for him at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As he learns to harness his newfound powers with the help of the school's kindly headmaster, Harry uncovers the truth about his parents' deaths -- and about the villain who's to blame.
In the second installment of the two-part conclusion, Harry and his best friends, Ron and Hermione, continue their quest to vanquish the evil Voldemort once and for all. Just as things begin to look hopeless for the young wizards, Harry discovers a trio of magical objects that endow him with powers to rival Voldemort's formidable skills.
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The Royal Ballet Company brings Squirrel Nutkin, Tom Thumb, Hunca Munca, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Jeremy Fisher, Pigling Bland, and Pigwig to the screen doing pirouettes and pas de deux in this filmed ballet production directed by Reginald Mills. The film more properly belongs, however, to choreographer Frederick Ashmore, composer John Lanchbery, and costume designer Rostislav Douboujinsky. This literal adaptation concerns the shy Beatrix Potter and how, when all of the toy animals in her room come to life, she emerges from her shell and begins to enjoy life. Sequences include a rowdy dance with Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca destroying a collection of plaster food, a midnight pas de deux between Pigling Bland and Pigwig, and a corps de ballet of dancing mice.
Shipwreck survivors are found on Beiru, an island previously used for atomic tests. Amazingly free of radiation effects, they believe they were protected by a special juice given to them by the natives. A joint expedition of Rolithican and Japanese scientists explores Beiru and discovers many curious things, including two women only a foot high. They are taken from the island, which only awakens the giant moth that wreaks havoc on Japan.
The four-inch-tall Clock family secretly share a house with the normal-sized Lender family, "borrowing" such items as thread, safety pins, batteries and scraps of food. However, their peaceful co-existence is disturbed when evil lawyer Ocious P. Potter steals the will granting title to the house, which he plans to demolish in order to build apartments. The Lenders are forced to move, and the Clocks face the risk of being exposed to the normal-sized world.
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In medieval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
Snehmoy (Rahul Bose) and Miyage (Chigusa Takaku) are pen friends who exchange wedding vows through letters. Fifteen years pass but they never meet. Yet the bond of marriage is strong between them. This unusual relationship comes under a cloud when a young widow, Sandhya (Raima Sen), comes to stay with Snehmoy along with her eight-year-old son Poltu. Snehmoy and the little boy bond and the arithmetic teacher discovers the joy of palpable bonds and fatherhood. There develops an inexplicable thread of understanding with Sandhya too. But Snehmoy remained loyal to his unseen Japanese wife. When Miyage was ill from cancer, he took a long leave from his school and tried his best to find a cure for the illness. Meanwhile, malaria took a toll on him and he died. Coming of Miyage in a white sari to Sunderbans after his departure was really touching.
When a woman, able to read the thoughts of others, comes to help survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, she encounters a girl with Multiple Personality Disorder whose dangerous 13th personality, Isola, must be stopped
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Akasen Chitai [Red Light District, aka Street of Shame] sadly, the very last film by Kenji Mizoguchi (Sansho Dayu, Ugetsu Monogatari) presents a vivid portrait of prostitution in 1950s Japan. In a Tokyo brothel named Dreamland an obvious irony given the faded hopes of those who work there the lives of five prostitutes intersect. Each has a very different story for how they entered the profession, but what they share is the struggle to make sense of the red light district and its cycle of exploitation. Filmed shortly before the Japanese government's introduction of an anti-prostitution bill, Akasen Chitai is a compelling study of women torn between financial necessity and questions of conscience.
Against the background of an Australian desert landscape, so much space and so few people, Sandy, a geologist, and Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman, play out a story of human inconsequence in the face of the blistering universe. The end of the journey leaves no-one capable of going back to where they started from.
Set during Japan's Shogun era, this film looks at life in a samurai compound where young warriors are trained in swordfighting. A number of interpersonal conflicts are brewing in the training room, all centering around a handsome young samurai named Sozaburo Kano. The school's stern master can choose to intervene, or to let Kano decide his own path.
In 1942 British soldier Jack Celliers comes to a japanese prison camp. The camp is run by Yonoi, who has a firm belief in discipline, honour and glory. In his view, the allied prisoners are cowards when they chose to surrender instead of commiting suicide. One of the prisoners, interpreter John Lawrence, tries to explain the japanese way of thinking, but is considered a traitor.
A lonely Japanese girl reaches out to a former classmate.
As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.
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The adventure unfolds as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - Tom's friend from the streets - witness a murder in the graveyard. Tom and Huck flee to Jackson Island and make a pact never to tell anyone about the incident. However, when the good-natured Muff Potter, who has been blamed for the murder is sentenced to death by hanging, Tom breaks his promise and returns to exonerate Muff Potter. In jun Joe, the actual murderer, makes a hasty exit from the courtroom during the trial. A short time later, Tom and Huck find references to a treasure and have to face In jun Joe again.
Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story is a made-for-TV film starring Australian actress Poppy Montgomery. The film, which was shot in B.C. Canada locations altered to look like British locations, details the journey of struggling single mother J. K. Rowling, her bid to become a published author, and her rise to fame that followed the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The film aired on Lifetime on July 18th and was criticized for being too lacklustre (mainly down to the fiercely private author having no say in the production) but it also shed some light on her personal life and featured scenes such as her highly abusive first husband and the death of her mother. The eponymous J.K. Rowling is the world's first billionaire (in terms of US dollars) author and the films inspired by her books have been the highest grossing films of all time. Poppy Montgomery reportedly got blue contact lenses to play the role of the highly influential author.
The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
On a trip to Paris Sally meets Pablo, a tango dancer. He starts teaching her to dance then she returns to London to work on some "projects". She visits Buenos Aires and learns more from Pablo's friends. Sally and Pablo meet again but this time their relationship changes, she realises they want different things from each other. On a trip to Buenos Aires they cement their friendship.
Based on the internationally acclaimed novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha is a sweeping romantic epic set in a mysterious and exotic world that still casts a potent spell today. The story begins in the years before WWII when a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
A young refugee travels from Russia to America in search of her lost father and falls in love with a gypsy horseman.
American and Japanese soldiers, stranded on a tiny Pacific island during World War II, must make a temporary truce and cooperate to survive various tribulations. Told through the eyes of the American and Japanese unit commanders, who must deal with an atmosphere of growing distrust and tension between their men.
A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.
During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?
During World War II a secret agent (Tang Wei) must seduce, then assassinate an official (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai. Her mission becomes clouded when she finds herself falling in love with the man she is assigned to kill.
Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) is given a special assignment by the Army to get the inside story on Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), a former GI who has formed a gang of fellow servicemen and Japanese locals. They use their muscle to take over Tokyo's pachinko racket and commit a series of train robberies, targeting deliveries of military ammunition.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Japan sinks! Proving once again that Japan will never cease to find inventive ways to destroy itself on screen, this summer's blockbuster Sinking of Japan brings apocalypse through tectonics. Based on Sakyo Komatsu's best-selling novel, Sinking of Japan was first put on the big screen in Moritani Shiro's 1973 classic. In 2006, director Higuchi Shinji remakes the disaster movie, taking the story to
Idealistic engineer-trainee and his experiences in teaching a group of rambunctious white high school students from the slums of London's East End.
In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words use by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, also called Men Behind the Sun 4, is a 1994 Hong Kong film directed by Mou Tun Fei and is in many ways considered to be a follow up to the 1987 shockumentary film, Men Behind the Sun. The movie depicts the events behind the Nanking Massacre committed by the Imperial Japanese army against Chinese citizens and refugees during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Like Men Behind the Sun, the film was both criticized and praised for its brutal portrayal of the Japanese atrocities, such as the notorious contest to kill 100 people using a sword, during the early and late stages of World War II, but at the same time was questioned over historical accuracy and violence which gave the film a more exploitation feel to it.
Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.
An obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian living in Bangkok spends most of his days contemplating suicide in his lifeless apartment. His life changes when he witnesses the death of Nid, seconds before he was about to jump off a bridge. This brings him in contact with Nid's elder sister Noi - these two lost and lonely souls help each other find the meaning to their meaningless existences.
Last House on the Left follows a group of teenage girls heading into the city when they hook up with a gang of drug-addled ne'er-do-wells and are brutally murdered. The killers find their way to the home of one of their victim's parents, where both father and mother exact a horrible revenge.
There are breakpoints in the history, the result of a single event may change the whole course. In 1909, an assassination attempt of a Japanese governor fails. Now, in 2009, Korea is just another state of Japan's Empire & Seoul has become a major city. A Korean resistance group fights for liberty, independence & the restoration of true history. Two cops, Japanese & Korean, investigate the group.
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