Sightlines · a viewing thread

Unmoored in Modern Japan

Watch these when you want Japanese cinema at its most restless — lives knocked off their axis by divorce, disaster, migration, or heartbreak, and the strange grace of piecing them back together.

Cult and cinephile objects rather than crowd favorites — Sōmai and Ishii are film-education discoveries, Iwai and Nakashima more widely adored; all four are emotionally demanding, and Matsuko's abuse and Swallowtail's violence earn a watch-when-ready.

• Moving (1993)
• Swallowtail Butterfly (1996)
• August in the Water (1995)
• Memories of Matsuko (2006)
• All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) — The Iwai you forgot you'd saved — if Swallowtail Butterfly's beauty-and-cruelty haunted you, this is the same director turning that restless dislocation onto provincial adolescence, a poisonous drift through bullying and extortion that's even harder to shake.
• A Scene at the Sea (1991) — The under-seen Kitano to finally pull down if August in the Water's hush and Moving's quiet grace landed — two deaf lovers at the margins of modern Japan teaching themselves the sea, all wordless devotion and off-axis stillness.