Japan

A lightning-paced 60's crime film from Japan's Nikkatsu Studios, Three Seconds to Explosion packs enough subterfuge and action into its 84 volatile minutes to fill out a dozen pictures made anywhere else.

NEW RESTORATION!  Inspired by an actual event during WWII, Josef von Sternberg's Anatahan, tells the story of a dozen Japanese sailors who are stranded on the remote island of Anatahan during the waning days of the war. The war ends, unbeknownst to the men, and they engage in their own private war for dominance of their island domain and possession of the sole woman in their midst, Keiko (Akemi Negishi), the so-called "Queen Bee" of Anatahan.

After moving into her first apartment, Sayaka invites her friends to come over and celebrate. During the party, she begins acting strangely, before suddenly running to the balcony and jumping to her death. At the funeral, stunned and horrified, her friends and family refuse to believe Sayaka committed suicide. Her sister Mariko begins investigating and learns that Sayaka wasnt the first to plummet to her death in Apartment 1303. The room has a shocking history and Mariko is about to come face-to-face with an evil more powerful and terrifying than she could ever have imagined.

Caterpillar tells the story of a village woman given the grueling task of looking after (and fulfilling the sexual needs of) her quadruple amputee husband, a Japanese soldier in the Second Sino-Japanese War who has been decreed a "War God" by the Emperor. The film serves as a powerful indictment of Japan's militaristic, nationalistic past.

In his 1975 masterpiece COPS VS. THUGS, director Kinji Fukasaku (BATTLE ROYALE) paints a dynamic portrait of flourishing corruption and unchecked greed using gritty 70s cop movie elan and true crime expose' detail. Brimming with irresistibly brutal vitality, COPS VS. THUGS demonstrates why Fukasaku counts filmmakers Takeshi Kitano, Quentin Tarantino and Takeshi Miike as devoted acolytes.

Assigned a standard Yakuza film in the hardboiled vein pioneered at Japan's famed Nikkatsu Studios, director Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill) and his frequent leading man Jo Shishido used 1963's Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! to flip the Japanese gangster film genre on its ear.

A feature documentary as mercurial as its subject: the impresario of the international avant-garde art movement Fluxus (1962-78). Featuring interviews with Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, and Nam June Paik.

Mainland master Jia Zhangke scales new heights with Mountains May Depart. At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, Jia's new film is an intensely moving study of how China's economic boom and the culture of materialism it has spawned has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.

Down on their luck and desperate for money to buy drugs, Mitsuru (Tetsuji Tamayama) and Maki (Asami Mizukawa) have the perfect plan. They decide to kidnap a young girl and hide out in an abandoned school, until their demands are met. Everything is going according to plan, until they realize they have made one gross miscalculation. Their hostage died a year ago today and now its their turn.