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On January 26, 2024, it was revealed that Satoshi Kirishima, a fugitive wanted in connection with a series of corporate bombings and a member of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, had been hospitalized in Kanagawa Prefecture. He had been living under an alias but came forward, saying, “I want to face the end with my real name.” Kirishima passed away three days after the news broke, and due to his death, he was not prosecuted for his suspected involvement in the bombing of the Korea Industrial and Economic Research Institute building, for which he had been on the national wanted list under charges of violating explosives control regulations.

This year saw two films tackling the his life, both directed by former associates of Koji Wakamatsu, whose ties with Jra and Pflp are well documented. Banmei Takahashi created “I Am Kirishima,” while Masao Adachi, who was more deeply involved in the armed...

Genre-blending English quintet Squid have announced a new album on the way. Cowards, their third LP, is set to arrive on February 7th via Warp, and they’ve offered a first look at the album with “Crispy Skin.” Watch the sprawling music video below.

“Crispy Skin,” the album opener, sees an opening of synths quickly descend into a driving rhythm. The eerie music video was directed by Takashi Ito and acts as an adaptation of his short film, Zone, centered on a faceless individual.

“I couldn’t eat another thing/ No more pages and pages of crispy skin,” lead vocalist Ollie Judge sings. In a statement, he shares that the theme of the track was inspired by the novel Tender Is the Flesh, in which a virus has contaminated all meat, leading to the normalization of cannibalism. “Humans are manufactured and sold in supermarkets,” he explains. “The track was written...

Shot entirely on a smartphone in the Seki neighborhood of the city of Kameyama, Mie Prefecture, “Toyou Brothers” is a film that unfolds its story through a number of timelines, while presenting a series of varying comments.

Toyou Brothers (2023) is screening at Japan FilmFest Hamburg

The story begins in 1820, where various people visit the Toyou Brothers job agency, which seems to have been active since the Edo period. Initially run by the younger brother solely, the agency eventually becomes the object of interest of a number of individuals, who start to realize that the one who runs it is not aging at all. The mystery becomes more intense when his older brother, somewhat disoriented, also appears, with the question regarding why he appears much older than his younger sibling actually carrying to the end of the film. As Westernization is taking over the country, people start selling the particular style...

Following Kazuya Shiraishi's excellent biopic “Dare to Stop Us”, which revolved around Koji Wakamatsu and his production company but essentially focused on Megumi Yoshizumi, a young aspiring director that joined the company in 1969, the sequel presents a somewhat similar story.

Hijacked Youth – Dare To Stop Us 2 is screening at Nippon Connection

This time, the setting is Nagoya in 1983, when Wakamatsu decided to open his own independent micro cinema, Cinema Skhole, and had Junji Kimata, a former programmer who was selling video equipment at the time, run it. The first part focuses on the relationship of the two and the struggles they faced in order to sustain the theater, which eventually led them to feature pinku films for the most part. The second and biggest part of the movie, though, focuses on the actual life of Junichi Inoue at the time, who dropped out of film school in order to become assistant director to Wakamatsu.

By the late 60s and the beginning of 70s, a number of independent filmmakers frequently mixed fiction with non-fiction while appropriating journalistic materials of well-known media events. Nagisa Oshima and Koji Wakamatsu were two of the most prominent directors in that regard, with “Season of Terror”, which was released just two months after “Go, Go, Second Time Virgin” , being a prominent sample.

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In that fashion, the movie begins by presenting a series of press photographs and newspaper headlines, mostly focusing on the student riots and their clashes with the police, along with the military training of what appears to be a rightist group. As soon as the rather impressive montage is finished, we are introduced to the first protagonist of the movie, a former radical leader who has been out of sight for quite some time. Next, we get to meet the other two,...

Winner for Best Director – Short Film from Cinemalaya, “As He Sleeps” is a very intriguing, bordering on blasphemous one could say, short that deals with the concept of the ‘sanctity of marriage” in a rather unusual way.

In a visual style that reminds intently of Lino Brocka, the movie begins with a woman smoking in an apartment, while a voice condemning adultery is heard. The woman is named Christina, is in her 30s, and it turns out she has to take care of her paralyzed husband, Hector. As she cleans him with a sponge in his bed, a photo of them being happy in the past shows how their relationship was before he became bed-ridden. A man who has come to buy their TV arrives a bit later, taking the appliance with him. She has just also got rid of their goldfish, throwing them in the sink, perhaps in a...

Allow me to start with a very personal note. I think that the 60s and early 70s was the most interesting period in the history of Japanese cinema, with the avant-garde approach that emerged at the time resulting in some of the most unique films ever to see the light of day. At the same time, and considering that the majority of works about Japanese cinema history we get our hands in the West are written by Western writers, it is always interesting to see how much more light locals can shed on the subject. Lastly, and in the same path, considering that the “Aesthetics of Shadow” by Daisuke Miyao was truly masterful, I was really eager to read “Cinema of Actuality”.

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After a prologue, which is, as usual in academic works, the most complicated part in the whole book,...

Revolution+1.On July 8, 2022, Shinzo Abe, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Japan in its postwar years, was shot and killed in broad daylight in a country with barely any civilian access to firearms. The suspect was immediately arrested, and commentators from all over the world began to speculate about the killer’s motive. After a few days, the police revealed that the 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own gun and tracked Abe’s movements, had not originally planned to kill Abe. In fact, the most high-profile political assassination in decades was carried out by a man who cared little for politics. Legendary Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, sensing a story sure to be misconstrued by the press, immediately began production on a biopic—not of Abe, but of Yamagami. At the North American premiere of the film, Revolution+1 (2023), last July, he said that this quick turnaround was not intended to garner controversy,...

Juro Kara is a Japanese avant-garde playwright, theatre director, author, actor, and songwriter. He was at the forefront of the Angura (“underground”) theatre movement in Japan, while as an actor, he cooperated with some of the biggest names of the Japanese movie industry, including Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Shuji Terayama, Toshio Matsumoto and Koji Wakamatsu. As a director, however, he only came up with one title, co-produced by Atg “Sea of Genkai”, an unusual type of yakuza film that focuses intently on the treatment of Korean women in the hands of the Japanese.

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The movie begins with a young man causing a ruckus on a high traffic street, until an older man takes him under his wing. The young man is named Taguchi and seems to have no one in his life, which is why he almost immediately becomes...

Considering Koji Wakamatsu's most significant output percentage, that dealt with pinku films that still managed to appear avant-garde despite the sex and violence presented in them, and the way Art Theatre Guild gave essentially complete freedom and a more significant budget than what they had in the particular type of films to its directors, the collaboration of the two was a great “experiment” from the get go. It seems, however, that the two reached an equilibrium of sorts, with “Eros Eterna” being one of the most artful and even spiritual and sociopolitical on occasion, erotic/exploitation films Wakamatsu ever shot.

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In a style that reminds of de Sade's “120 Days of Sodom”, the movie revolves around a priestess who believes she is the reincarnation of the Happyaku Bikuni-sama, a legendary nun who lived for eight-hundred years but retained the...

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Safe to say there isn’t another country bar Japan where a handful of top directors, including celebrated auteurs and an Oscar winner, learned their craft in adult films. Or perhaps even anywhere else in the world where that is imaginable.

But when cinemagoing plunged in parallel with the penetration of television sets into homes in the 1960s, it was so-called Pink Eiga that kept large parts of the movie industry afloat for decades, nurturing a generation of directors, scriptwriters and other filmmaking crew.

Usually between 60 and 70 minutes long, shot on 35mm and released in theaters, often on triple bills, the low-budget productions gave directors a lot of freedom provided they delivered the prescribed number of sex scenes.

In 1964, with the eyes of the world on Japan as it reemerged onto the world stage after World War Two as host of Tokyo Olympics,...

Festival opens with Teppe Isobe’s ’Deadly School’.

Eight local features wiill have their world premiere at Japan’s Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, which is running as a hybrid event from July 16.

The festival opens with the world premiere of Teppe Isobe’s coming of age drama Deadly School, which is adapted from the play by Kaoru Asakusa about high school girls working hard for their school festival. Teppe Isobe has won prizes at Skip City for three of his films Who Knows about My Life (2018), F is for Future (2019) and Cornflakes (2020).

Held in Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, Skip City focuses on emerging talent,...

Atsuko Hirayanagi on Oh Lucy! executive producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay: "I started warning people. Because I don't want them to feel betrayed." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Atsuko Hirayanagi's wanderlust-y debut feature Oh Lucy!, co-written with Boris Frumin and based on her short film, stars Shinobu Terajima (Kôji Wakamatsu's Caterpillar) with Josh Hartnett (John Logan's Penny Dreadful), Kaho Minami (Zhuangzhuang Tian's The Go Master), Shioli Kutsuna (Masatoshi Kurakata's Neko Atsume House), and Kôji Yakusho (Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel).

Executive produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay with terrific work by costume designer Masae Miyamoto (Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love), Oh Lucy!, which had its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival and received the Sundance Institute Nhk award in 2016, takes us on an unexpected road trip which made me recall a line from Jean Renoir's The Rules Of The Game (La...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Akihiko Shiota's Wet Woman in the Wind (2016), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from November 24 - December 24, 2017 as a Special Discovery.Much like Hollywood, the Japanese film industry goes to the well as often as possible once it hits a lucky strike. Such was the case with the so-called Roman Porno films of the 1970s, an infamous genre of sexploitation primarily identified with Japan’s oldest major studio, Nikkatsu. Financial trouble necessitated a popular, inexpensive product, and these softcore numbers were just the ticket. This may have been the studio where Kenji Mizoguchi and Shohei Imamura made films early in their careers, but by 1971 the Roman Porno factory was in full swing, producing quick, cheap, titillating product for an audience hungry for female toplessness and a great deal of convulsive thrusting.

Exclusive: Off-beat romantic comedy set to premiere in Cannes Critics’ Week.

Paris-based Elle Driver has snapped up international sales on Atsuko Hirayanagi’s off-beat comedy romance Oh Lucy! ahead of its premiere in Cannes Critics’ Week.

Top Japanese actress Shinobu Terajima stars as Setsuko, a lonely, chain-smoking office worker in Tokyo, who brings fresh meaning to her life when she starts taking English lessons, dons a blond wig and adopts a new American persona called Lucy.

In the process, she also falls for her American English teacher played by Josh Hartnett. When he suddenly disappears, she teams up with her sister to track him down in a journey that will take them to some of the sleazier parts of outer Los Angeles.

The feature builds on Hirayanagi’s short film of the same name which premiered in Cannes in 2014, after winning the second prize in the festival’s Cinéfondation Selection initiative focused on shorts and medium-length works from...

Exclusive: Adam McKay and Will Ferrell are executive producing the feature adaptation of Atsuko Hirayanagi’s short film, which stars Shinobu Terajima and Josh Hartnett.

Shinobu Terajima and Josh Hartnett are heading the cast of Us-Japan co-production Oh Lucy!, which marks the feature debut of Japanese director Atsuko Hirayanagi.

A feature-length version of Hirayanagi’s short film, also titled Oh Lucy!, the film is produced by the Us’ Matchgirl Pictures, Gloria Sanchez Productions and Meridian Content.

The comedy drama tells the story of a lonely, chain-smoking office lady in Tokyo (Terajima) who falls for her teacher (Hartnett) when she decides to take English lessons. When her teacher disappears, she sets out on a journey to find him that takes her to Southern California.

Producers on the film include Yukie Kito (Tokyo Sonata), Jessica Elbaum (Welcome To Me), Hirayangi and Han West (Lemon), while Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Meileen Choo and Razmig Hovaghimian are on board as executive...

I’ve been making 16mm durational urban landscape voiceover films, slowly but surely, since the late ‘90s. My short film Blue Diary premiered at the Berlinale in 1998. My two features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) both premiered in the prestigious New Frontiers section at the Sundance Film Festival and have been as wildly successful as experimental films can be. Which is to say, they remain fairly obscure. My small but enthusiastic fan-base frequently asks me for recommendations of films that are similar to my own in terms of incorporating durational landscapes and voiceover and a meditative pace. While it is certainly one of the smallest subgenres in the realm of filmmaking, here are a handful of excellent landscape cinema examples by the practitioners I know best. I confess that my expertise here is limited and hope that the learned Mubi community will chime in with additions in the comments field below.

Naked Bullet is a light Japanese 60s gangster flick with its fair share of nudity and quite a lot of bullets. The film breathes the air of the 60s and feels like a tasty but forgettable snack one has in between a great lunch and an awesome dinner. Director Kôji Wakamatsu (1936-2012) directed more than 100 films during his lifetime, all the way up to his death, and even though it certainly is entertaining, it is not one of the films he is remembered for. But that doesn’t mean it should be forgotten.

The film follows Shou (Ken Yoshizawa), a gangster who got in trouble with his former boss over a girl. 5 years have passed since that day and he still holds a grudge as he has since started to work with a gang of his own. He crosses paths with Akemi (Miki Hayashi), a girl who works for his...

Rotterdam this year has offered one certifiable giant discovery in international cinema: German filmmaker Dominik Graf, revealed in a simultaneously introductory and interventionist retrospective programmed by Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller. An incredibly prolific filmmaker beginning in the late 1970s, Graf has interwoven his cinema into the fabric of the German television industry, producing a body of work ranging from television episodes, made-for-tv films, essay movies, documentaries, and a handful of films intended for the cinema.

Yet despite Graf's prodigious output of nearly sixty works, its primarily creation for national television has meant that it has been essentially unavailable to English-speaking audiences prior to Rotterdam's 17 film retrospective. The first film of his I saw was Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around) in the middle of the Dreileben trilogy in 2010, notably another for-television project, but one which had festival and theatrical ambitions beyond German living rooms, perhaps due...

The names that have left us just keep coming over the last week. Word has reached us that the great Japanese director Kôji Wakamatsu has died after being hit by a taxi in Tokyo. 2012 has been a banner year for the filmmaker, who saw three new features released, including one at Cannes (11/25 The Day Mishima Chose His Fate, our review) and one at Venice (The Millennial Rapture).

"With regard to longevity and productivity, not to mention talent, the only peers of the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900–83) are his contemporaries Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock," writes J Hoberman, opening a review of Román Gubern and Paul Hammond's Luis Buñuel: The Red Years 1929-1939 for the Nation. Read of the day, obviously.

More reading. Carlos Saura on the five films that have most influenced his own work (via Criterion Cast).

Ed Howard on four shorts by Maurice Pialat.

Pat Jordan for the New York Times Magazine on "How Samuel L Jackson Became His Own Genre."

For the Wall Street Journal, John Jurgensen talks with Sissy Spacek about her forthcoming memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (via Movie City News).

In Reverse Shot, David Ehrlich argues that Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is "a vital (if imperfect) chapter of this beloved saga, as...

The fourth annual Migrating Forms media festival, which will run May 11-20 at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC, is a compelling mix of political films, pop culture explorations, ethnographic exposés and collections of new media art.

The fest begins and ends with political films directed and curated by Eric Baudelaire. His latest work, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, opens the festival on May 11; while a pair of films – Masao Adachi & Kôji Wakamatsu’s Red Army/Pflp: Declaration of World War and The Dziga Vertov Group’s Ici et Ailleurs closes it on May 20.

Some of the special events sprinkled throughout the event include Ed Halter‘s survey of faux experimental films made for mainstream movies and TV shows that should prove to be an amazingly entertaining and enlightening discussion; a retrospective of the highly influential animation by Chuck Jones; the interactive...

The 36th annual Hong Kong International Film Festival has opened today and will screen 283 films from 50 countries through April 4. Betsy Sharkey's there for the Los Angeles Times: "It is a time of transition for the Pearl of the Orient, a territory of 7 million that reverted from British to Chinese rule 15 years ago. Hong Kong, perhaps more than any other place outside the mainland, has felt the rise of this new superpower in its art, commerce and politics, and the many of city's movies in the three-week festival capture that dynamic. Consider the opening night film, Love in the Buff, director Pang Ho-Cheung's sardonic look at two former lovers who are part of the relatively recent reverse wave of migration — moving from the ex-colony to Beijing, where job prospects are suddenly brighter." It's a sequel to 2010's Love in a Puff. "In Life Without Principle, Johnnie To crafts an action-satire commenting on wealth-obsessed Hong Kong.

In the new March 2012 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Colin Beckett previews a "five-film retrospective sampler" of work by Hong Sang-soo running at the Museum of the Moving Image from March 17 through 23: "Wherever his characters go, be it Paris or a Korean resort town, they do the same things: arrange themselves in complicated love triangles, treat others poorly, drink too much, then treat each other even worse. His deliberately artificial camera movements — long pans back and forth, and half-motivated zooms, mostly — treat real space the way a camera usually approaches a photograph or a painting: flattening it, drawing horizontal and diagonal lines to map its elements. He is concerned with atmosphere in the literal sense: the particular qualities of light and air in the types of spaces to which he obsessively returns: beaches, restaurants, apartments."

Hong's Tale of Cinema (2005) is not one of the five (which, by the way,...

(Another retro screening from L'Etrange 2011, which I wanted to write a review for since I went in blind, ended up watching the whole thing and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to.) Kôji Wakamatsu's A Pool Without Water proves George Carlin right - you can laugh at rape, be it a little uneasily. The legendary Japanese director's 1982 film, about an introverted menial working on the metro who discovers his true calling as a Casanova forcing himself on unconscious women, probably doesn't seem like a comedy. Or much of a turn-on, even, unless you entertain that sort of fantasy. But despite the undeniably disturbing nature of the material, the fact you're essentially watching porn and the unintentional comedy in how badly it...

[United Red Army begins a one-week engagement at the IFC Center in New York today. This review originally appeared in conjunction with the film's North American Premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival in July 2008.] Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. The dates, facts, and figures come flying out of the introductory section of United Red Army like a machine gun, accompanied by a hypnotic musical theme, shooting down any possible suspicion that director Kôji Wakamatsu intended to make an audience-friendly film about the Japanese student movement of the late 60s and early 70s. Indeed, the tone is so strident that you feel guilty for not taking notes, as though a class were being taught and you were not properly prepared to answer questions asked by the...

United Red Army, Kôji Wakamatsu's terrifying gut-punch epic, opens tomorrow in New York for a limited run, and would appear to have no connection at all with Kinji Fukasaku's Cops vs. Thugs, beyond sharing the same country of origin. (We'll get to the connective tissue later.) Truthfully, when I pulled the DVD of the latter film off my shelf, I wanted to sit back and allow a slam-bang action flick to snap me out of a minor mental funk. But that would be too easy for Kinji Fukasaku. Even with both hands tied behind his back, he could toss off kinetic action scenes, seemingly at will. By 1975, Fukasaku had made more than 30 films, most if not all in the Toei studio system; at...

"Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death has the title and the feel of a monument," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "This widescreen, austerely monochromatic, two-hour-plus collective drama — depicting the worst indignity inflicted by foreigners on modern China, as well as the most terrible atrocity in the run-up to World War II — might have been hewed from rock and colored by soot."

Further in, he notes that the film "frequently, if superficially, adopts a Japanese point of view, something that evidently infuriated a sizable chunk of the Chinese audience. (The movie would have been pulled from theaters after one week were it not for the protection of the Communist Party's chief propagandist; although a popular hit, it received no official awards.) On the festival circuit since 2009, the film has been well-received by foreign critics, recognizing a historical epic in the Griffith-Lean-Spielberg tradition."

This reception bugs Michael Joshua Rowin, writing...

With 2010 only a week over, it already feels like best-of and top-ten lists have been pouring in for months, and we’re already tired of them: the ranking, the exclusions (and inclusions), the rules and the qualifiers. Some people got to see films at festivals, others only catch movies on video; and the ability for us, or any publication, to come up with a system to fairly determine who saw what when and what they thought was the best seems an impossible feat. That doesn’t stop most people from doing it, but we liked the fantasy double features we did last year and for our 3rd Writers Poll we thought we'd do it again.

I asked our contributors to pick a single new film they saw in 2010—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they saw in 2010 to create a unique double feature.

"We have exciting news on the horizon for Kôji Wakamatsu fans," tweeted Kino Lorber a few days ago. "An official theatrical release of United Red Army???" asked Kenji Fujishima. The answer was coy but promising: "Maybe..."

Parisians won't have to wait. The Cinémathèque française's Wakamatsu retrospective opens today and runs through January 9, accompanied by the publication of Koji Wakamatsu, cinéaste de la révolte. Marc Saint-Cyr at Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow: "Hopefully this retrospective and publication will be signs of things to come for English viewers and readers eager to learn more about this fascinating filmmaker. In the meantime, though, there is a pretty great book already out there to tide people over: Jasper Sharp's thoroughly-researched Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, which features a fair bit of information on Wakamatsu, his rise in the pinku eiga ranks and his remarkable collaboration with Masao Adachi."...

The New York Asian Film Festival completed another successful run more than two weeks ago. By all rights, this review should have run before United Red Army had its North American Premiere on the fest’s last day, but it took me this long to wrap my head fully around it. My apologies. I an currently self-criticizing my actions.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.

The dates, facts, and figures come flying out of the introductory section of United Red Army like a machine gun, accompanied by a hypnotic musical theme, shooting down any possible suspicion that director Kôji Wakamatsu intended to make an audience-friendly film about the Japanese student movement of the late 60s and early 70s.

Indeed, the tone is so strident that you feel guilty for not taking notes, as though a class were being taught and you were not properly prepared to answer questions asked by the deep-voiced narrator. Initially fascinating,...

This afternoon writer-director Gonzalo López dropped us an e-mail regarding his independent horror remake entitled Embryo (Embrión). He tells us that the movie is a new version of the classic Japanese cult film The Embryo Hunts In Secret (1966), directed by Koji Wakamatsu and is the first remake of a Japanese film in the history of Spanish cinema. The story revolves around a young man named Carlos (Sergio Bernal) with a sexual trauma who kidnaps a girl (Mariona Tena) that works with him. During the kidnapping the sexual tension and the violence will make that the two of them change their point views on life and politics. You can also find a teaser trailer and as more information about the film and the cast and crew in the official website. Read on for the teaser poster.

Forum

BERLIN -- Suffused with recollected passions of a bona fide activist, and sober historical hindsight, "United Red Army" transcends its national and historical specificity as an elegy to Seventies idealism, in kindred spirits with Ken Loach's "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Its accounts of the "Mountain Base Incident" and "Asama Lodge Incident" create a celluloid monument to a chapter in Japanese history skipped over in school books. However, at 190 minutes, it is so fanatically faithful in tracing the roots of Japan's left-wing movement and ensuing fractured radicalism, so unflinching in its re-creation of Orwellian internal purging as well as the power hunger and bloodlust that motivates it, that it is a physical and emotional long haul for any viewer.

As the vanguard of Japanese radical cinema and a friend/collaborator of Japanese Red Army member/filmmaker Masao Adachi, there is arguably no one more qualified than Koji Wakamatsu to take the helm. His cult status among European cineastes as a master of pink eiga will no doubt secure that niche market. The film was named best Japanese film at Tokyo International Film Festival.

Structured into three acts, the first charts the rise of the zenkyoutou student movement in 1970, its waning, and splintering into factions. The morass of merged archival and fictional material takes an hour to unfold, and totally swamps the uninformed. However, there are scenes crucial to later dramatic development, such as the activists' inherent violence to each other.

The second act is breathtakingly tense, when two extremist factions merge to become the United Red Army on July 15, 1971. Members undertake military training in a hidden base inside Nagano's mountains. Their initial Boy Scout enthusiasm as they hike and build a log cabin form an ironic prelude to the harrowing Maoist "self-criticism" that escalates from verbal humiliation to bloody beatings and executions with ice picks. The final act and climax is the seizing of a ski resort inn by a few desperado members following the group's disbanding. Their 10-day hold-off is objectively stresses both their politeness to the hostage, and their caged animal madness.

The brittle performance of Akie Namiki, as deputy leader Nagata impersonates a spine-chilling cross between Gang of Four leader Jiang Qing and Mrs. Ceausescu. Go Jibiki's Mori is equally memorable in his cold-blooded brutality and calculation. Wakamatsu eschews the dazzling experimental techniques of his earlier work in favor of a documentarylike and utilitarian style. His mastery of shooting in cramped interiors, alternates with his signature location shooting in single takes and natural lighting create powerful contrasts of the claustrophobia of a torture chamber with the glistening snowy landscape outdoors.

Although the narrative sometimes totters under the weight of its own gravitas, "United Red Army" is a must-see for students and intellectuals.

UNITED RED ARMY (JUTSUROKU RENGO SEKIGUN: ASAMA SANSO E NO MICHI)

Wakamatsu, Skhole Co/Wakamatsu Productions Tokyo

Credits:

Director-Editor: Koji Wakamatsu

Screenwriters: Koji Wakamatsu, Asako Otomo

Producers: Koji Wakamatsu, Noriko Ozaki, Asako Otomo

Director of photography: Tomohiko Tsuji, Yoshihisa Toda

Production designer: Geb Uti

Music: Jim O'Rourke

Cast:

Hiroko Nagata: Akie Namiki

Tsuneo Mori: Go Jibiki

Mieko Toyama: Maki Sakai

Running time 190 minutes

No MPAA rating...