The latest movie from Audition, Ichi the Killer, and 13 Assassins director Takashi Miike, titled First Love (Hatsukoi), made its premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival as part of the 51st Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year. The film has since been acquired by Well Go USA.

Now Well Go has released a new teaser trailer for First Love. You can find more info and give the trailer a watch below.

Magnolia Pictures and Magnet Releasing have released an official trailer for Blade of the Immortal, the 100th work of famed Japanese director Takashi Miike.

The film follows a samurai, who has been cursed with immortality. Only the killing of evil souls can undo the effects of this curse, and so he agrees to help a young girl avenge the murder of her parents.

Continue below for more on Blade of the Immortal, and to check out the official trailer.

Quentin Tarantino once referred to the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike as “the godfather of ultra-violent, get-under-your-skin movies.” Since his debut in 1991, Takashi Miike has created some of cinema’s most and controversial films, including Gozu, Audition, Ichi the Killer, and 13 Assassins.

After 22 years of directing feature films in Japan, Miike is now in talks to make his English-language debut with The Outsider, based on an original script developed by John Linson and written by Andrew Baldwin, with Tom Hardy attached to star.

Audition
Netflix | Amazon | iTunes | Vudu
DVD | Blu-ray
Directed by Takashi Miike
Starring Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi
Vitagraph Films
Originally Released: October 06, 1999

I love talking about movies with people, and so a matter that recently came up in discussion was a brainstorm/list of some of the most fucked up movies we’ve ever seen. While many suggested were ones I had seen, one stood out to me as one of those I’d always anticipated to see, but had never gotten around to it: Audition. So, taking the advice of a gypsy goddess, I dove back into my healthy obsession for horror and gore and challenging movies, and queued it up for my streaming review.

Audition is, in essence, a very deceiving movie. While it’s marketed and classified in the horror genre, the very cringe-inducing moments come much later in the film, though this does not diminish its impact. The story focuses on Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a widower, who after many years of raising his son Shigehiko Aoyama (Tetsu Sawaki) on his own decides that it is time to begin dating again.

The very best films of 2012 accurately depicted the fragility of mankind and of its spirit. These are not new topics meant to provoke awe. Every year, cinema depicts the most inconceivable of situations and pits characters in them to fend for their lives. In 2012, the best of cinema took an intense foray into pain and suffering but with an unerring intent to discern what it was that permitted or encouraged particular characters to endure certain tragedies.

What was discovered in these elite films was the profoundest reverence for togetherness and dependability. The police, being dragged around the uninhabited fields of Anatolia searching for a dead body, still managed to cooperate with two murderers in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. If it was not for a fast-thinking scout master who gathered Camp Ivanhoe’s finest boy scouts to search for two young lovers who fled the coop in Moonrise Kingdom, they would forever be stranded on their own magical island (is that really a bad thing?). Instead of two souls aimlessly suffering existence alone in The Master, they endure together and astonishingly discover what each one so desperately needs in the other: a sense of worth. The father and daughter in Beasts of the Southern Wild would not survive the aftermath of the storm if it were not for their true, illustrious relationship. And the octogenarian couple in Amour is the only proof we need to know that it takes two people, solidified in an unbreakable relationship, to stand firm, face life and to stare the inevitable square in the eyes.

The following are my picks for the 30 best films of 2012.