'Azumi' is a frantic CGI-assisted Japanese period drama from cult director Ryuhei Kitamura starring pop siren Aya Ueto as a teenage assassin who begins the film as the only girl among 10 warriors who have been trained from childhood by Jiji, a grey-bearded samurai. One day, Jiji tells them they must pass a final test before they embark on the mission they have prepared for all these years. He pairs them up and the five that survive, led by Jiji, descend from the mountain that is the only world t find out more...

'City of Life and Death', like the earlier 'City of War; the John Rabe Story', is an account of the Rape of Nanjing; the terrible crimes committed by the Japanese army during the sacking of the Chinese city and the desperate efforts to protect those, mainly Chinese, sheltering in the protected German zone. This version concentrates less on the atrocities and heroic whites and more on the growing sensitivity and terrible guilt of a Japanese sergeant.
An important and artfully made film. find out more...

This lavishly photographed and costumed action-drama-epic sticks to what we know of Genghis's early years, although that's not much, telling the story of how a young tribal boy overcame many obstacles, including slavery, to become a legendary conqueror. The widescreen suits this 'big sky' country and there is something remarkably authentic about the yurts and the costumes. Chosen for marriage, at the age of nine, by a female child, Borte, while he thinks he's doing the chosing, she becomes one o find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con find out more...

The period between the end of the Han Dynasty and the beginning of the Three Kingdom Periods is deeply engrained into Chinese myth, think of our own Arthurian legends, though Woo adapted this film from the historically accurate 'Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms' rather than the romantic 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms' (one of the 'Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature'). find out more...

A Chinese epic based around the rise and fall of General Pang who, on behalf of the ruling Qing dynasty, retook the cities of Suzhou and Nanjing during the unsuccessful Taiping Rebellion during the 1860s. The film starts with a beaten Pang meeting and allying with two bandits, Er-Hu and Wu-Yang, and forming the Shan Army. As they slash their way to victory they become the victims of their own disputes and rivalries and, with victory achieved, no longer the masters, but the wretched pawns in a bi find out more...