No film festival would be complete without a samurai sword epic and Blade of the Immortal, Takashi Miike’s 100th film, fits the bill perfectly. Based on a manga series it stars Takuya Kimura as Manji, a Shogunate era samurai, granted by a witch the dubious gift of eternal life. After meeting a young girl, orphaned by a group of master swordsmen, Manji wreaks vengeance on them through a series of stylised showdowns – brilliantly choreographed, outlandishly violent and sometimes brutally comic to boot.
"Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It's part Kurosawa, part 'X-Men', part 'Ichi the Killer'" - Washington Post
At the other extreme of Japanese cinema we have The Third Murder from KFF favourite Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maasharu Fukuyama (Like Father, Like Son) plays a famous defence attorney named Shigemori, who willingly takes the tough case of Misumi ,a man who murdered his boss. We know he did it. He’s confessed to doing it. There’s little mystery there. But the reason why he did it is important to his sentence.
"The Third Murder offers the satisfactions of a well-constructed suspense story, with twists that come from the characters of its principals, not plot contrivances" - Japan Times
Continuing our far eastern journey, we come to Mountains May Depart from China and directed by by Jia Zhangke. Set in 1999, 2014 and 2025, Mountains May Depart revolves mostly around its everyday heroine, Tao (Zhao Tao, Jia's muse on and offscreen), a woman caught somewhere between the dream and the reality of modern China.
"Jia’s languid style and exquisite framing complement his understated approach to the material, which opts for depth over melodrama. ...Mountains ... is grounded in Zhao’s delicate performance, a character caught between progress and tradition, her life running in place, each day blending into the next.” - San Francisco Chronicle
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