Toshie Negishi Movies

An American journalist in search of the love he once left behind travels to a mysterious Japanese island where the past is best left forgotten in the one installment of Showtime's Masters of Horror series that was too controversial for American television. It was long ago that Christopher (Billy Drago) met the mysterious prostitute who captured his heart, but their grim fate was forever sealed when he left the island with only a promise to return one day in the future. Unlike many of the insincere souls who promise to spirit the prostitutes away from the dark and infernal island, Christopher actually made good on his word. However, life is cheap on this bewitched island where the local brothel is the sole refuge for weary souls, and though he ultimately proved to be a rare exception to the rule, Christopher has taken far too long to fulfill his promise. Now, as he shares his woeful tale with a horribly scarred whore (Youki Kudoh) whose knowledge of his long lost love's true fate may prove more of a curse than a blessing, Christopher is about to discover that there are times when death can be the kindest release of all. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

The oft-filmed life story of Sada Abe -- a courtesan who killed her lover during lovemaking and then cut off her favorite organ as a keepsake -- has been the stuff of legend for over 60 years. In Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1998 adaptation of the same story, he went for a less explicit, more postmodern tact; this film tries to get to the roots of Sada's motives. Born into a poor and lonely childhood during the beginning of the 20th century, Sada (played by television star Hitomi Kuroki) is raped at the age of 14 by a thuggish college student (Masaku Ikeuchi) but saved from further degradation by Okada (Kippei Shina), a mysterious medical student who sports sunglasses and a long black coat. She falls for him, but unfortunately Okada has a dark secret; he has leprosy. Just before he departs from society to go to an asylum, he carves out an imaginary heart from his chest with a scalpel and gives it to Sada. Unable to get over the heartbreak of losing her true love, she becomes a prostitute. At age 29, she becomes the lover of a wealthy civil servant named Tachibana (Bengal) who buys her out of prostitution and apprentices her to a teahouse. There she meets Tatsuzo (Tsurutaro Kataoka), with whom she discovers a passion that she never found in the arms of her thousands of johns. When his wife learns of their tryst, she kicks Sada out. Soon Tatsuzo -- who abandoned his wife -- and Sada are holed up in a dinky apartment as sexual fugitives. Feeling like he has lived all he needs to live, he encourages her to pull the chord across his throat as part of a kinky sex game. This film won the International Film Critics Prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Following up on his critically acclaimed, blood-splattered epic Ran, master director Akira Kurosawa looks inward with this collection of eight brightly colored dreams. The first section centers on a young boy (Mitsunori Izaki), who witnesses a forest wedding procession of fox spirits in spite of his mother's (Mitsuko Baisho) warning. The second section concerns the same lad who converses with peach-tree spirits after the trees have been cruelly cut down. This is followed by a party of mountain climbers struggling to make it back to base camp in the midst of a terrible blizzard. The fourth dream deals with a man (Akira Terao) -- a Kurosawa stand-in complete with the director's trademark floppy white hat -- who encounters ghosts of Japan's militaristic past in a forlorn tunnel. In the following dream, the same man ventures into a Van Gogh painting called The Crows and meets the artist himself (Martin Scorsese). The sixth and seventh dreams venture into nightmare territory -- one deals with a nuclear meltdown that threatens Japan while the other concerns post-nuclear mutants. In the final dream, Kurosawa meets a 103-year-old man (played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) in a utopian rural village. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi