New on Blu-ray: UNDERWORLD BEAUTY / ANKOKUGAI NO BIJO (1958)

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Product Description: Retrieving the diamonds he stashed before his arrest, thief Miyamoto hopes to help his old partner Mihara, crippled during the heist. Their former boss, crime lord Oyane, offers to mediate with a foreign buyer, but secretly wants the stones for himself. The deal goes awry when gunmen appear on the scene. Mihara swallows the diamonds but dies in the chase, leaving a valuable corpse in the police morgue. Miyamoto forms an uneasy alliance with Mihara's wildcat sister Akiko to keep the gems away from gangsters, cops and even Akiko's greedy boyfriend. This wildly inventive early noir sees Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tattooed Life) infectiously playing with genre rules and gender stereotypes.

Find out more about this DVD/Blu-ray release after the jump.

A TALE OF SORROW AND SADNESS / HISHU MONOGATARI (1977) - Blu-ray Release of Japanese Drama Starring Yoko Shiraki

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Product Description: The editor of a sports magazine grooms fashion model Reiko (Yoko Shiraki) to become a pro golfer, while retaining exclusive rights to her likeness. Reiko's popularity soars after she wins her first tournament and she becomes a media sensation, but when she and her manager (Yoshio Harada, Zigeunerweisen) cause a hit-and-run accident, the victim begins to blackmail Reiko, intruding further and further into her personal life. This was Seijun Suzuki's comeback film after being blacklisted by the film industry for ten years. Though adapted from a popular manga, the bold visuals and absurdist plot twists are vintage Suzuki.

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Find out more about this DVD/Blu-ray release after the jump.

New on Blu-ray: UNDERWORLD BEAUTY / ANKOKUGAI NO BIJO (1958)

BUY FROM AMAZON

Product Description: Retrieving the diamonds he stashed before his arrest, thief Miyamoto hopes to help his old partner Mihara, crippled during the heist. Their former boss, crime lord Oyane, offers to mediate with a foreign buyer, but secretly wants the stones for himself. The deal goes awry when gunmen appear on the scene. Mihara swallows the diamonds but dies in the chase, leaving a valuable corpse in the police morgue. Miyamoto forms an uneasy alliance with Mihara's wildcat sister Akiko to keep the gems away from gangsters, cops and even Akiko's greedy boyfriend. This wildly inventive early noir sees Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill, Tattooed Life) infectiously playing with genre rules and gender stereotypes.

"The Entertainment Factor is supported by its audience. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission."

Find out more about this DVD/Blu-ray release after the jump.

New on Blu-ray: TATTOOED LIFE / IREZUMI ICHIDAI (1965)

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Product Description: Tetsuo (Hideki Takahashi, Fighting Elegy), a low-level yakuza is double-crossed by his boss and attacked. His younger brother Kenji (Kotobuki Hananomoto, This Transient Life), an aspiring artist with no connections to crime, comes to his aid and kills Tetsuo's assailant. Fearing repercussions from the yakuza they flee to Manchuria where they risk coming under suspicion of rival gangs. Seijun Suzuki (Branded to Kill) remains loyal to the conventions of the yakuza film, but Tattooed Life contains flashes of his later creative genius, including a final act of explosive visual excess that has become one of the director's all-time classic scenes.

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New on Blu-ray: SEIJUN SUZUKI'S THE TAISHO TRILOGY (1980-1991)

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Product Description: After over a decade in the wilderness following his firing from Nikkatsu for Branded to Kill (1967), maverick director Seijun Suzuki returned with a vengeance with his critically-praised tryptic of cryptic supernatural dramas set during the liberal enlightenment of Japan s Taisho Era (1912-26).

In the multiple Japanese Academy Award-winning Zigeunerweisen (1980), two intellectuals and former colleagues from military academy involve their wives in a series of dangerous sexual games. In Kageroza (1981), a playwright is drawn like a moth to a flame to a mysterious beauty who might be a ghost, while Yumeji (1991) imagines the real-life painter-poet Takehisa Yumeji s encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.

Rarely seen outside of Japan, the films in the Taisho Trilogy are considered Suzuki s masterpieces in his homeland. Presenting a dramatic turn from more his familiar tales of cops, gangsters and unruly youth, these surrealistic psychological puzzles drip with a lush exoticism, distinctively capturing the pandemonium of a bygone age of decadence and excess, when Western ideas, fashions, technologies and art fused into everyday aspect of Japanese life.

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Find out more about this DVD/Blu-ray release after the jump.