At the peak of her international career, Maria Enders is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous twenty years ago. But back then she played the role of Sigrid, an alluring young girl who disarms and eventually drives her boss Helena to suicide. Now she is being asked to step into the other role, that of the older Helena. She departs with her assistant to rehearse in Sils Maria; a remote region of the Alps. A young Hollywood starlet with a penchant for scandal is to take find out more...

Ghost Dog is an assassin, but what sets him apart from his fellow killers, apart from his lethally effective abilities, are his many character traits including communicating by carrier pigeon and following the warrior code of the Samurai. His occasional employers, the comically inept local mafia, place a contract on him so Ghost Dog, strictly following the way of the Samurai, sets about turning the tables on his hunters. "Ghost Dog" is a hip, offbeat, thriller with all the usual quirks and humou find out more...

What action there is in this downplayed drama stems from the homoerotic tensions generated by the enrolment of a beautiful young samurai into the Shinsengumi Militia, a school famous for its strict discipline code, and the period setting of late 19th Century Japan is effectively used to evoke the extreme secrecy that any kind of institutional homosexuality was forced to exist in. The swordplay provides a welcome interval between the desperate (and often sad) sex scenes, showing the samurai tende find out more...

The movie that confirmed Kurosawa's greatest strength, his innovative handling of genre. It's set amid the civil wars of 16th Century Japan, and concerns samurai Mifune escorting a princess and two oafish peasants through enemy territory. Kurosawa's treatment is part traditional (the plotting, the concept, the use of Noh theatre music), part eclectic (there are reminiscences of John Ford Westerns), and part truly idiosyncratic (the Shakespearean contracts between clowns and heroes). find out more...

A beautifuly staged historical epic set in a sixteenth century Japanese civil war. find out more...

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Life is crazy. You're crazy, I'm crazy, we're all crazy. We're all a little bit Minnie, and a little bit Moskowitz. Sometimes it does seem best to be sensible...but then what might you be missing out on? You gotta be you. You don't have to park cars and semi-randomly yell at people, but you can't hide yourself behind a veil (or dark sunglasses) and pretend and act like ever find out more...

A weird story, based on legend, about a mother and her daughter-in-law who survived in times of hardship by murdering Samurai and selling their armour to buy rice. A wonderfully strange and visually striking Japanese folk tale, unusual in itself, but also a beautiful and detailed character study. find out more...

Paying homage to the spaghetti western, renowned and prolific director Takeshi Miike has created a typically unique and stylized Japanese action western set during the Genpei clan civil wars of the 12th Century, though he has given Quentin Tarantino an acting role… will they never learn?! find out more...