Features • Lists

Artists’ Choice #11: Kanji Furutachi (actor) lists his 10 Favorite Japanese Movies

January 22, 2019
Panos Kotzathanasis

is best known for playing Toshio, one of the leading roles in “Harmonium”, directed by Koji Fukada, which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

He has also appeared in numerous plays in Japan, including the title role for the play “The Treasured Son”, which won Japan’s most prestigious drama award: The Kishida Drama Award.

His many film appearances include “Hospitalité” and “My Back Page” (for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Award from the Takasaki Film Festival and the Best New Comer Award at the Tama Cinema Forum). He studied acting with Uta Hagen, Carol Rosenfeld, and many others at HB Studio in New York City.

Here are his ten favorite Japanese films, in no particular order

1. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952)

Buy This Title

2. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

Buy This Title

3. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Buy This Title

4. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa

Buy This Title

5. The Yellow Handkerchief (Yoji Yamada, 1977)

Buy This Title

6. Shall We Dance? (Masayuki Suo, 1996)

Buy This Title

7. Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2002)

Buy This Title

8. In This Corner of the World (Sunao Katabuchi, 2016)

Buy This Title

9. Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)

Buy This Title

10. The Kirishima Thing (Daihachi Yoshida, 2012)

Buy This Title

Tags

About the author

View All Posts

Panos Kotzathanasis

Panagiotis (Panos) Kotzathanasis is a film critic and reviewer, specialized in Asian Cinema. He is the owner and administrator of Asian Movie Pulse, one of the biggest portals dealing with Asian cinema. He is a frequent writer in Hancinema, Taste of Cinema, and his texts can be found in a number of other publications including SIRP in Estonia, Film.sk in Slovakia, Asian Dialogue in the UK, Cinefil in Japan and Filmbuff in India.

Since 2019, he cooperates with Thessaloniki Cinematheque in Greece, curating various tributes to Asian cinema. He has participated, with video recordings and text, on a number of Asian movie releases, for Spectrum, Dekanalog and Error 4444. He has taken part as an expert on the Erasmus+ program, “Asian Cinema Education”, on the Asian Cinema Education International Journalism and Film Criticism Course.

Apart from a member of FIPRESCI and the Greek Cinema Critics Association, he is also a member of NETPAC, the Hellenic Film Academy and the Online Film Critics Association.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

>