"Whenever I watch Seven Samurai I am immediately transported to sixteenth-century Japan. No analysis is possible, no appreciation of performance, direction, camera work, music. Somehow, I'm left feeling that miraculously, Kurosawa found a way to dig up a 400-year-old Japanese documentary. It’s a film completely devoid of artifice or ego. I have seen many of the actors in other films, but I always feel as if they’ve made some mistake, that their true identity lies in Seven Samurai. Like few films I have ever seen, this one somehow makes me feel ennobled. It’s visual Beethoven."

"To be found in the When Horror Came to Shochiku set from Eclipse, Horishi Matsuno’s engagingly demented Japanese picture jumbles gruesome crime, supernatural vengeance, psychic twins, mad science, and strange sea story—it may never settle on a tone, but its unpredictability is compelling. Haunted by her twin sister, who was murdered during a pirate attack, Saeko is mentored by a priest whose cool sunglasses conceal an evil secret identity and scars. Other pirate victims appear as living skeletons who inhabit a wreck and bring about the deaths of their murderers, and there’s also a mad scientist with vampire tendencies in the mix."

"A great film by Paul Schrader, best known for having penned a bunch of legendary screenplays for Martin Scorsese. The film revolves around Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and jumps between the story of his life and dreamlike depictions of scenes from his books. It’s got a particularly good score by Philip Glass, who I usually find to be tedious, but this one is nice. Schrader’s use of color and set design during the book segments of the film are quite theatrical and feel closely related to Robert Wilson’s on Einstein on the Beach—although I don’t have any evidence to back that connection up. Great flick, though."