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Japan Society and Metrograph have teamed up to co-present “Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us,” a rare 30-film retrospective devoted to the “fourth great” master of Japanese cinema. Co-organized with the Japan Foundation, New York, the two-part series, running May 9 to June 29, will offer the first major New York survey of the landmark filmmaker’s work in 20 years, presented in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of his birth and screened entirely on rare prints imported from collections and archives in Japan. Notable series highlights include all six of Naruse’s adaptations of celebrated feminist author Fumiko Hayashi’s work (Floating Clouds, Repast, Lightning, Wife, Late Chrysanthemums, A Wanderer’s Notebook), as well as some of Naruse’s rarest films, including the New York premieres of three pre-war gems unscreened in previous retrospectives: Morning’s Tree-Lined Street, A Woman’s Sorrows, and Sincerity.

With an oeuvre spanning nearly four decades and...

Historically speaking, many are used to looking at Japan during World War II for the more notorious aspects, such as the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army or the dictatorship rule of a militaristic government that regularly promoted ultra-nationalistic notions. It seems unreal to some that Japanese citizens had differing mindsets during this historical period of waging aggression. Yet, it would be unwise to label every individual in Japan as standing for the same values, as there were also plenty of pacifistic perspectives that were seen as controversial at the time. One can only imagine what it must have been like for children growing up during the Showa period with constant clashing mindsets. These elements would play into the narrative of Keisuke Kinoshita's “Twenty-Four Eyes,” a beautiful film that promotes love and pacificism during a time of nationalism and war.

Twenty-Four Eyes is screening at Nippon Connection

“Twenty-Four Eyes...

Mikio Naruse solidified himself as one of Japan’s most admirable filmmakers. His work is known for the pessimistic yet raw outlook on life, showing that the world is not a perfect place while focusing on human vulnerability. Much like Kenji Mizoguchi, he frequently gave women a voice in his work, notably working with beloved actress Hideko Takamine throughout his career. In addition, Naruse would sometimes create premises for narratives that sound surreal on paper yet would be executed wonderfully on film. Look no further than his final masterpiece, “Scattered Clouds,” also known as “Two in the Shadow.”

Released in 1967, this would be Mikio Naruse’s final film, as he would later pass away in 1969 from cancer. His health was already declining when he made this movie, yet that didn’t keep him down when directing this tragic love story. Fittingly writing the screenplay is Nobuo Yamada,...

Considered one of the best Japanese movies of the 60s (and all time) Mikio Naruse’s masterpiece is an ode to realism and minimalism, as well as a rather thorough study of the role of women in the Japanese society of the 60s, stripped from any kind of disillusions.

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Every afternoon, young widow Keiko leaves her small apartment to attend a bar in Ginza, where she entertains entrepreneurs after they finish work. Due to her kind nature, the younger girls at the bar call her “mama”, acknowledging her finesse and beauty as the apogee of their profession. Kenichi, the man in charge of the bar, has feelings for her, but he keeps them hidden, while retaining a respectful distance from her, as much as a meaningless relationship with a young and ambitious barwoman, Junko.

As time changes, girls...

When an actor appears in many films of a particular director it becomes a sort of short-hand subject to define either’s work. Sometimes it feels as if one influenced the other, or vice versa, but these collaborations end up becoming a large portion of the public’s knowledge about their prowess. One of the most emblematic of those collaborations is the Akira Kurosawa-Toshiro Mifune combo, maybe only rivaled by John Ford and John Wayne—probably not a coincidence.

But what lies beyond the confines of those classic Kurosawas? The Film Forum retrospective, now underway through March 10 and co-presented by Japan Foundation, brings 33 films showcasing the wide acting range of Toshiro Mifune. While it does contain the now-classic collaborations, it gives an opportunity to look beyond. Below, five of the least-known films from their series.

Snow Trail (Senkichi Taniguchi), 1947)

Toshiro Mifune’s first film has him top-billed alongside Takashi Nimura,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe announced today in IndieWire the upcoming launch of our new original podcast! Hosted by arts and travel reporter Rico Gagliano, the first season of the Mubi Podcast will focus on films that have great importance in their home country, but are lesser known by international audiences and critics. We begin with Paul Verhoeven's second feature Turkish Delight and its unique significance during the counterculture movement in 1970s Holland. The episode feaures exclusive interviews with Paul Verhoeven, Monique van de Ven, and Jan de Bont. Check out the trailer above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts here.Filmmaker Milton Moses Ginsberg, best known for his debut feature Coming Apart (1969) and the horror comedy film The Werewolf of Washington (1973), has died. The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Steven Soderbergh's latest, the...

It was always only a matter of time until modern Hollywood resigned itself to remaking anime. Which isn’t to suggest that the uniquely Japanese medium is somehow unworthy of being used as fodder for Western blockbusters — on the contrary, anime has provided some of the most progressive, adventurous, and visionary filmmaking of the last 30 years — but rather to acknowledge the palpable whiff of inevitability with which Paramount is releasing “Ghost in the Shell.”

It’s not like studio executives are obsessive fans of the franchise, it’s not like former Paramount CEO Brad Grey bought every new DVD of “Stand Alone Complex” as it was released in the United States and can walk you through every detail of the Laughing Man case, it’s not like the people in power were just patiently waiting for the entertainment climate to warm up to the idea of a star-studded Major Kusanagi...

Want a nine-hour dose of the truth of existence so harrowing that it will make you feel grateful no matter how humble your situation? Masaki Kobayshi's epic of the real cost of war boggles the mind with its creeping revelations of cosmic bleakness. Yet all the way through you know you're experiencing a truth far beyond slogans and sentiments. The Human Condition Region B Blu-ray Arrow Academy (UK) 1959-61 / B&W / 2:35 anamorphic widescreen / 574 min. / Ningen no jôken / Street Date September 19, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK £ 39.99 Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Chikage Awashima, Ineko Arima, Keiji Sada, So Yamamura, Kunie Tanaka, Kei Sato, Chishu Ryu, Taketoshi Naito. Cinematography Yoshio Miyajima Art Direction Kazue Hirataka <Film Editor Keiichi Uraoka Original Music Chuji Kinoshita Written by Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi from the novel by Jumpei Gomikawa Produced by Shigeru Wakatsuki Directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The first Blu-ray of perhaps...

Elizabeth Taylor, Farley Granger, Jane Russell, Peter Falk, Sidney Lumet: TCM Remembers 2011 Pt. 1

Also: child actor John Howard Davies (David Lean's Oliver Twist), Charles Chaplin discovery Marilyn Nash (Monsieur Verdoux), director and Oscar ceremony producer Gilbert Cates (Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, I Never Sang for My Father), veteran Japanese actress Hideko Takamine (House of Many Pleasures), Jeff Conaway of Grease and the television series Taxi, and Tura Satana of the cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

More: Neva Patterson, who loses Cary Grant to Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember; Ingmar Bergman cinematographer Gunnar Fischer (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries); Marlon Brando's The Wild One leading lady Mary Murphy; and two actresses featured in controversial, epoch-making films: Lena Nyman, the star of the Swedish drama I Am Curious (Yellow), labeled as pornography by prudish American authorities back in the late '60s,...

The 35th edition of the San Francisco International Lgbt Film Festival, or Frameline35, opens tonight with Rashaad Ernesto Green's Gun Hill Road (image above) and runs through June 26 — Gay Pride Day — closing with Geoffrey Sax's Christopher and His Kind.

Michael Hawley previews eight narrative features and six documentaries, and he's got a top recommendation for each category, beginning with Céline Sciamma's Tomboy: "It's the summer before 4th grade and Laure's family has moved to a new town. When a potential playmate mistakes her for a boy, athletic Laure plays along and becomes Mikael to all the neighborhood kids — a charade that's kept hidden from her parents until just before the start of school. This complex and intelligent tale about gender identity won a jury prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival and it's now one of my favorite films of the year." And in Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva's Angel,...

Above: Street without End. Photo courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

In March the Criterion Collection released a quiet salvo of intervention into the sad state of home video distribution in the U.S. of films by Japanese studio master Mikio Naruse. After just a solitary release of the filmmaker (1960's masterpiece, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, also put out by Criterion) comes an Eclipse-label boxset of early 30s silent films by the director: Flunky, Work Hard! (1931), No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933), Every-Night Dreams (1933), and Street without End (1934). The set, Silent Naruse, instantly dramatically multiplies the number of titles available to American audiences—though sadly, as Dave Kehr recently implied in his review of the set for the New York Times, it isn't exactly a set of canonical masterpieces bound to invigorate and excite shocked discovery of a foreign master.

But then again, Naruse may be one of the...

It's been a while since we've posted a still from a Mikio Naruse movie here at the Notebook, so here ya go—and this one doesn't even have Hideko Takamine in it (a first?).

Instead, it's Triple Crown of Japanese Acting (Ozu! Naruse! Mizoguchi!) holder Michiyo Kogure in a moment of typically-Narusean anxiety in Even Parting is Enjoyable, M.N.'s contribution to the 1947 Toho omnibus Four Love Stories. Despair and unflattering haircuts go hand-in-hand.

Nick Pinkerton in the Voice on Five Japanese Divas, running from tomorrow through April 21: "Rarefied Ozu, bold Kurosawa, saturnine Naruse, magisterial Mizoguchi. The Great Men are here, and then some, but Film Forum's 23-feature series foregrounds other names in the credits: Yamada, Kyo, Tanaka, Hara, Takamine — the women of Japanese cinema's ridiculously fecund postwar Golden Age, when on-screen drama addressed an upended social reality for a national audience that suddenly included many females cashing their first paychecks."

Time Out New York's David Fear offers a "quick primer" on Setsuko Hara ("The Girl Next Door"), Machiko Kyô ("The Chameleon"), Hideko Takamine ("The Icon"), Kinuyo Tanaka ("The Martyr") and Isuzu Yamada ("The Technician").

"Considered a bold feminist statement for 1936 Japan as well as a turning point in his own career, Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion is a perfect showcase for his early muse, Isuzu Yamada," finds Joe Bendel.

"Of...

Starting today, and for most of April, Film Forum in New York will be honoring five of Japan’s greatest actresses in a portmanteau retrospective entitled 5 Japanese Divas. The divas in question are Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo and Hideko Takamine who, collectively, starred in some of the greatest Japanese films of the 1950s golden age (there are more masterpieces per square foot in this retrospective than in any other theater in town). Takamine died last December at the age of 86 (and was featured on Movie Poster of the Week earlier this year), but, remarkably, three of these goddesses—Kyo, Hara and Yamada—are still with us, aged 87, 90 and 94 respectively.

I love the Japanese posters of the 1950s with their crowded montages of faces (I can never be sure if they are photographs or hyper-realist illustrations) in which the actors are paramount, more because I love the...

The great Japanese actress Hideko Takamine, who passed away on December 28 at the age of 86, has been eulogized beautifully on Mubi already (here, here, here and here) but I wanted to add my own personal tribute in posters. The 1958 Rickshaw Man (directed by Hiroshi Inagaki) starred Takamine as a young widow opposite Toshiro Mifune. I wish I could have found better poster images for Takamine’s films for Mikio Naruse (if anyone has better ones please let me know) but I did manage to find these smaller jpegs for Naruse’s masterpieces Floating Clouds (1955, top) and Lightning (1952, below left), as well as one for Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1951 Carmen Come Home (below right).

I also really like this poster for a recent Takamine retrospective that I found on someone’s Tumblr page. Hideko Takamine rest in peace.

Updated through 1/5.

Word is just now beginning to get around that actress Hideko Takamine died on Tuesday at the age of 86.

"From her first screen appearance at age five, Hideko Takamine was for decades one of the most beloved Japanese screen stars," writes Kyoko Hirano for Film Reference, tracing the career from the Shochiku Studio to the Toho Studio, then Shin-Toho, for whom she appeared in Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters (1950), "to which she brought her light, comic flair to the serious and tragic tone of the film." After going freelance, "Takamine became the indispensable heroine in 12 [Mikio] Naruse films, in which she created the archetype of the strong-willed, hardworking woman unrewarded at the bottom of society or subjugated by the family system. Among these excellent portrayals, her role in Floating Clouds [1955] was outstanding, bringing her and the film all the major awards of 1955. Playing a character living in the confusion of postwar Japan,...

2010 began and ended with the deaths of great octogenarian film artists. Eric Rohmer died on January 11, a few months shy of his 90th birthday; and Hideko Takamine left us on December 28, at the age of 86. In Rohmer's case, death had been waiting in a corner of the room: just a few months before, we had seen Jackie Raynal's 2009 documentary footage, showing the alarming decline of his physical (but not mental) powers over the course of a few months. But it was quite different with Hideko, who was said to be living happily in retirement in Hawaii with her husband, writer Zenzo Matsuyama. Out of the sight of film audiences since 1979, she existed in a sunlit, remote corner of the imagination: there seemed no reason for her ever to die.

The image of Hideko that comes quickest to my mind is a scene from Mikio Naruse's A Wife's Heart...

Celebrated Japanese actress Hideko Takamine has lost her battle with lung cancer. She was 86.

Takamine passed away at a Tokuo hospital on Tuesday, reports Kyodo News.

The actress made her film debut at the age of five in 1929 silent film Haha (Mother) and rose to fame as Japan's answer to Shirley Temple.

She gained stardom with 1938's Tsuzurikata Kyoshitsu (Writing Lessons) and went on to appear in a string of major hits in the 1950s, including Niju-shi no Hitomi (Twenty-four Eyes) in 1954, Ukigumo (Floating Clouds) in 1955 and Yorokobi mo Kanashimi mo Ikutoshitsuki (The Lighthouse) in 1957.

Her fame continued after she retired from acting in 1979, when she embarked on a second career as an award-winning essayist.

She is survived by her husband, director and writer Zenzo Matsuyama.

I'll be honest, I haven't heard of Hideko Takamine until I heard about her death. Not many would have heard of her in this day and age; she retired from acting back in 1979, which was before I was even born. However, once I started to look into who she was, I found that she is more than deserving of our respect.

She was born in 1924, and made her first on screen debut at the age of 5 in the silent film Mother. Her rise to stardom was fast, as her fame as a child actor grew exponentially. She easily transitioned to teen roles, including her first lead in 1941 called Hideko the Bus Conductor.

From Shall We Meet at 7? (1963): a perfect pop song, ghostly early video technology and a crew that has decided that what a Kyû Sakamoto TV special really needs is more German Expressionism.

Those of you who've been racking your brains over how to link Mikio Naruse to Snoop Dogg, fear no more—you have an answer, with help from Dan Sallitt. "Ue o muite arukō" (known in the States as "Sukiyaki") was inspired by lyricist Rokusuke Ei's breakup with actress Meiko Nakamura (the comely nurse who makes Hideko Takamine so worried in "Women's Ways"); Slick Rick threw in a verse from the maudlin English-language cover / Hair Cuttery favorite by Taste of Honey into "La Di Da Di," which Snoop then made his own on Doggystyle. You're welcome.

From "Women's Ways," Mikio Naruse's contribution to the omnibus film The Kiss (1955), which consists almost entirely of scenes where Hideko Takamine, our favorite sad-eyed gal, looks at something or someone; cinematography by Kazuo Yamasaki. Suggested alternate title: "Sonata for Reaction Shot."

Miserable Mikio turns something like a Lubitsch comedy plot—a woman married to a doctor discovers that his young live-in assistant has a crush on him after stumbling upon her diary, and decides to solve the problem by finding the girl a suitor—into a funny mini-tragedy, playing the final punchline for equal parts irony and heartbroken resignation.

Almost all of the action transpires across Takamine's face. When she meets her brother at a cafe where a tinny proto-Muzak version of "The Blue Danube Waltz" gently farts in the background, and tells him that despite the situation, she "trusts her man," he responds: "That's not what your face is telling me.

Auteur-illustrator who proved more than anyone that cartoons are not just for kids has died aged 46 from pancreatic cancer

Director Satoshi Kon sadly passed away on Tuesday, succumbing to pancreatic cancer. He was only 46, and his legacy of work is a mere four completed feature films and one television series. So, it's likely many of you have not heard of the man – doubly likely since his films were all animated.

There has long been an argument regarding the validity of animation as a medium for adults. It's easy for many to dismiss animated film as being automatically for kids or, worse, for teenagers. But for myself and others, animation is just another way of telling a story or getting a message across to an audience. This is why I referred to Satoshi Kon as a "director" in the opening paragraph: his films are so involving and cinematic it's easy to...