Salaryman Takagi (Shinichi Tsutsumi) wakes up in a motel room still wearing a suit and not sure how he ended up there. As a packet of purification salt falls out of his pocket memories start flooding back. He remembers a funeral, an argument with his girlfriend, meeting a yakuza boss, some dancing, holding a shotgun, and then things get really crazy…

watch »

Permalink      0 Comments

Here’s the new trailer for Hiroshi Nishitani’s Suspect X (Yougisha X no Kenshin). I posted the first teaser here last month but the new trailer seems to do a better job of conveying the tone of the film and the comedic rapport between Kou Shibasaki and Masaharu Fukuyama. Based on a Fuji TV drama that featured the same two actors, the film centers around a mysterious murder in which the victim’s hand is severely burned but the cause of death is actually strangulation. Detective Kaoru Utsumi (Shibasaki) attempts to corroborate the alibi of the victim’s ex-wife and discovers the woman’s neighbor, a genius high school math teacher named Tetsuya Ishigami (Shinichi Tsutsumi), went to Teito University—the same school as genius physicist Manabu Yukawa, aka “Galileo” (Fukuyama). Knowing it will take a genius to catch a genius she enlists the help of Yukawa to figure out Ishigami’s role in all of it.

continue reading »

Permalink      1 Comment

The trailer for Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom is now online. In the movie Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo play scam artist brothers that come up with all sorts of elaborate schemes to separate rich people from their money. When they meet a young eccentric heiress named Penelope (Rachel Weisz) they initially plan to scam her, but instead end up enlisting her help on their next con. However, when one of the brothers falls for Penelope things get complicated. Rinko Kikuchi plays a quirky explosives expert appropriately named “Bang Bang” who’s also part of the team. Trailer embedded after the break.

continue reading »

Permalink      2 Comments

An ad exec named Goda (Shinya Tsukamoto) is mired in depression after his girlfriend’s suicide and becomes obsessed with obtaining the same model of gun she shot herself with. In his search he crosses paths with a street gang who beat him senseless, but he’s slowly becoming preoccupied with one of their members, Chisato (Kirina Mano). Once he finally finds the gun he was looking for, he inexplicably decides to protect the gang that beat him up.

watch »

Permalink      0 Comments

Based on a 1997 television drama, Bayside Shakedown begins as a corpse is found floating in the river near Bayside Precinct. Not only that, but their own commissioner has been kidnapped. To complicate matters, The Metropolitan Police Department gets put in charge of the case over the local cops, and refuse to clue them in on any of the details of their investigation. But Aoshima (Yuji Oda) will have none of that, and forces himself into the fray; much to the chagrin of the MPD. Luckily for Aoshima, his friend Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba) is heading the MPD investigation, and had promised Aoshima long ago that he would do his best to use his position in the MPD to make things easier for beat cops—but will he keep his word? You can find the teaser here.

watch »

Permalink      0 Comments