Asian Cinema Watchlist

A spell of time of a rural family's slightly surreal life.

A war-hardened general, egged on by his ambitious wife, works to fulfill a prophecy that he would become lord of Spider's Web Castle.

While searching for his fiancee Ritsuko, Sakutarou rediscovers through flashbacks the void deep within him caused by the events from his high school days.

Beijing, 1970s. Now that the CR has driven most adults to the provinces, 14-year-old Monkey and his pals have free reign over the city. They hang around, get up to no good, and discover that unsolvable mystery referred to as "girls."

The problematic lives of teenager students for whom the singer Lily Chou-Chou's dreamy music is the only way to escape an alienating, violent and insensitive society.

In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.

Yuko, a teacher of middle-school, is shattered to see her four-year-old daughter dead. She returns back to the school and finds out that her students are responsible for her daughter's murder.

Nami is an ex-convict who becomes a hostess to support a sick woman who bailed her out. In doing so, she gets involved in a local gangster's scheme to take over the bar she works for.

In a poor 19th century rural Japanese village, everyone who reaches the age of 70 has to climb a nearby mountain to die. An elderly woman is reaching close to her cut-off age during her last days with her family.

When technical illustrator Tony Takitani asks his wife to resist her all-consuming obsession for designer clothes, the consequences are tragic.

A married woman lets her lover take naked pictures of her. The photos end up in possession of a man who starts blackmailing the couple.

A kabuki theatre-inflected story about a poor village whose people have to be carried to a nearby mountain to die once they get old.

A seductive woman gets kidnapped into prostitution. After getting a spider tattoo made on her back, she grows vengeful, leaving several men in her path.

An aging Japanese industrialist becomes so fearful of nuclear war that it begins to take a toll on his life and family.

Plastics salesman Oshima disappeared without a word to anyone, and has been missing for two years. Shohei Imamura and his crew follow Oshima's fiancé Yoshie and actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as they investigate the disappearance.

Two boys begin a silence strike to press their parents into buying them a television set.

An old couple visit their children and grandchildren in the city, but receive little attention.

Several people try to talk 27-year-old Noriko into marrying, but all she wants is to keep on caring for her widowed father.

A schoolteacher struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, having neither money nor future prospects.

A doomed love between a paper merchant and a courtesan.

The ethereally beautiful Vicky recalls her romances with Hao Hao and Jack in the neon-lit clubs of Taipei.

Two neighbors form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.

A Japanese photojournalist revisits Vietnam after the Liberation and learns harsh truths about its regime and its "New Economic Zones".

After suffering a stroke, an altruistic maid announces that she wants to quit her job and move into an old people's home.

The lives of a Beijing family throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as they experience the impact of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.