I suspect most people's first encounter with Kyōsōgiga is going to be much like mine: first you're confused and frustrated, then you're fascinated, and then finally you're even a little bit moved and awed.

Yūzō Kawashima's Bakumatsu Taiyōden starts and ends as effortless entertainment, a breezy and bracing comedy exuding endless energy.

A gorgeous adaptation of the acclaimed manga, and a story with a hard moral question: Who gets to be redeemed?

Almost forty years later, this jet-black comedy about a one-man nuclear terrorist ring remains an absurdist masterwork

But there's more to Like The Clouds, Like The Wind than nostalgia or cross-references; it's a fine project in its own right.

Paul Schrader's 1985 film Mishima, co-funded by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, uses both the man's literary art and public theater to bring us to him from the inside out.

The freshman effort from ex-Ghibli creators Studio Ponoc at first seems like a riff on 'Kiki's Delivery Service' or 'Harry Potter' territory, but has morality rather than magic on its mind.

Many of the other strategies Liquid Sky used to be confrontational and novel have aged, some better than others.

But After the Rain, from Jun Mayuzuki's manga of the same name, isn't about romance, but something subtler and harder to come by.

What I can't complain about, and what makes the movie absolutely worth seeing anyway, is just about everything else in it.

I never believed anyone other than Takashi Miike deserved to adapt Hiroaki Samura's raucous, blood-drenched manga Blade Of The Immortal into a live-action film,

I approach Ichi The Killer in the way I would a friend who once did some pretty stupid things in high school.

Napping Princess feels like too much and too little at the same time.

A movie this good, there's always another layer to unwrap.

"Take the stairs, take the stairs, for god's sake take the stairs!!" begged the tagline on the posters for the Dutch cult movie The Lift.

Lustrous's microcosm is a crescent-shaped island somewhere out in the middle of an apparently endless ocean.

Like Wings of Desire, 2001, Night On The Galactic Railroad, or any of the other great works about man's place in the universe, Haibane Renmei inspires more reflection than certainty.

The key to Violent Cop is not in the violent moments, but the moments where Detective Azuma (Takeshi Kitano, a/k/a Beat Takeshi) just stands there.

Kaiba is set in a universe that has what I could describe as an alternate ecology.

It's not good, to be sure -- but maybe being its own special kind of bad is more valuable than we think.