A low-level sex writer for an adult paper who can't handle his girlfriend's success at work and command in the bedroom travels to Japan and accidentally becomes a porn star in this 3-D sex romp.

This ensemble family melodrama about expectations of beauty and marital betrayal features Pang's (Isabella) signature complex performances and magic-realist touch.

This revolutionary comedy about the cinematic genius of North Korea's late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il has a groundbreaking experiment at its heart: a propaganda film, made according to the rules of his 1987 Manifesto The Cinema and Directing.

The Japanese will always have Paris! In this adaptation of the arch-popular eponymous mystery novel by Matsuoka Keisuke, the city of l'art et l'amour provides the gorgeous backdrop for a grand intrigue involving the world's most iconic artistic treasure: the Mona Lisa. Armed with quasi-supernatural powers of deduction, bottomless knowledge on a limitless array of subjects, and, last but not least, cute-and-sexy librarian good looks that would give Audrey Tautou a run for her money, Rinda Riko (Ayase Haruka) is a brilliant appraiser whose “All-Around Appraiser Q” reputation earns the attention of the Louvre as a Mona Lisa exhibition is to be held for the first time in Japan. Accompanied by sidekick Ogasawara Yuto (Tori Matsuzaka), a magazine editor who follows Rinda for professional and possibly more personal purposes, she goes to Paris and finds her judgment challenged by the shroud of mystery and threats of theft surrounding the masterpiece as well as the Mona Lisa itself. Minds will be blown, puzzles will be solved, but will a 500-year-old curse be removed? From the director who gave you the blockbusters Gantz and Library Wars.

A China-Taiwan cross-cultural rom-com with an excellent, unforced chemistry between its leads, Apolitical Romance follows Mainland girl (Huang Lu) as she visits Taiwan and gets involved with a local guy (Bryan Chang) who helps her track down her grandmother's first love from 60-odd years ago. Despite its English title, politics are never far below the surface, though always in a light, easy way. Huang's feisty, argumentative Mainlander (with the actress turning on a broad Beijing accent) contrasts notably with Chang's softer, almost boyish Taiwanese, who throws a tantrum when she criticizes his collection of robot toys. She's constantly referring to Taiwan as a "province" rather than a country. In return, he tries to teach her some Taiwanese (Hokkien) dialect, and introduce her to local food. As the barriers start to fall, and she mellows, the romance starts to click in emotionally, with an airport finale that teases the audience whether the two representatives of Greater China territories will "unify" their relationship.

A squad of firefighters who used to be BFFs but now find themselves wallowing in Man Angst are brought back together by a power-plant explosion in this testosterone-fueled soap opera.

A light comedy of manners played out during 10 days in a seaside town, Au revoir l'été is a nicely played rondo of human behavior that echoes Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach (1983).

One of four short films commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the 29-minute project was developed with Kurosawa Kiyoshi's students at Tokyo University of the Arts. The story involves love at first sight, a stolen nameplate, a chase, and kung fu.

This innovative film about the blind employees of a massage center in Nanjing is a powerful ride through a parallel word of metaphysical cinema where light and darkness lose their usual meaning.

The first open-handed martial-arts film from Hong Kong to become a worldwide blockbuster was a major influence on the films of Bruce Lee and remains an exciting and terrific watch to this day.

This epic of nonstop suspense is a three-way race against time between a rumpled surveillance guru, a ruthlessly efficient criminal, and a new recruit eager to prove she's got what it takes.

This futuristic thriller follows an insurance salesman coerced to commit criminal acts by an unseen villain, who sends instructions over the phone and has control of the city's surveillance cameras.

One of the Shaw Brothers' best, and most underrated, directors, Kuei Chih-hung (Boxer's Omen) made his directorial debut with this attack dog of a film that leaps off the screen and goes for the audience's throat. Chang Cheh is listed as co-director, but he really just slapped his name on to reassure Run Run Shaw — every angry inch of this movie belongs to Kuei, from the opening credits of star Wang Chung smashing through photos of Hong Kong, to a final fish-eye shot from the POV of a dying man. One of the most aggressively experimental action movies ever to come out of Shaw Brothers, Kuei directed it like he'd never get a chance to make another movie, cramming in every wild idea he ever had. Wang plays an angry young man sweating to death in the grotty ghetto of modern-day Hong Kong, watching life pass him by one salty teardrop at a time. Throwing punches at the slightest instigation, Wang is recruited by a local gang and he has only one rule: never rob the warehouse where his dad works as a security guard. It takes about five minutes for that rule to get thoroughly violated, and after a long, tense, excruciating buildup, the film erupts into a final series of brutal fights that will leave you breathless. Truly feral.

An ambitious, brooding character study that intelligently tackles heavy issues like press ethics, the nature and causes of crime, the throes of guilt, the (im)possibility of redemption, and, at the deepest level, everyday banal evil, The Devil's Path is a slow burn that shows the hellish torment of a guilty conscience as it chronicles the case of a condemned yakuza played by actor-singer Pierre Taki. Seeking revenge on his former accomplice he reaches out to a journalist (Yamada Takayuki), and reveals details about three unknown killings. The film is a claustrophobic journey to the end of the night, and like the journalist to whom the dark tale is told, hardens its emotions, anxieties, and energies into a hard shell of obsession. For the death-row gangster who's now found God, killing is (was?) just part of the package—the costs of doing business as a yakuza. For his smilingly two-faced accomplice (Lily Franky), killing is just fun. And fun is good. The Devil's Path is caught between these two stygian souls as it relates their deeds, and it ultimately becomes an expression of philosophical despair: truth and justice can never be known.

No doubt the most extreme film experience of NYAFF, The Eternal Zero follows the quest of a young man investigating the life of his late grandfather, a reluctant kamikaze pilot, during the Pacific War.

The Face Reader, which beat Iron Man 3 at the Korean box office last year, is a lavish period drama with high-level cast at the top of its game, juicy dialogue, and a smooth mixture of low comedy and high drama.

Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau plays a prissy police detective who's getting his butt handed to him by flashy thief Nam (Hu Jun, Drug War), an insanely competent career criminal who knocks over armored cars like dominos.

Oozing so much debonair that he makes Don Draper look drab, Chow Yun-fat fires on all cylinders as a no-holds-barred gambler who will do absolutely anything to entertain an audience.

This irresistible comedy about life in a run-down apartment complex offers laughs aplenty and a lead performance by comedienne Oshima Miyuki as a Japanese everyman rich in friends and poor in romance.

Sandra Ng plays Kum, a hooker with a heart of gold and a brain of bubblegum who takes us on a tour of Hong Kong's history, as seen from the bedroom.

Kum has aged into a hard-working madam with a calculator for a soul who must round up her girls, deck them out for a night on the town, and fulfill the needs of her hard-partying clients.

How would you define the word "right"? Cult arthouse director Ishii Yuya (Sawako Decides) has racked up all the top honors at the Japan Academy Awards earlier this year with this deceptively simple yet immensely captivating, existential comedy/drama featuring a charmingly nerdy editor, Majime Mitsuya (Matsuda Ryuhei) who spends decades dutifully writing and compiling definitions for a "living language" dictionary entitled The Great Passage. On the surface an oddball ode to logophiles, the film is in fact a deeply humanist tribute to the power of language to connect people as well as a poignant study of life's slow but steady progression. Beginning in the pre-Internet mid-1990s, The Great Passage starts with the passing of the massive dictionary project from longtime editor Araki Kohei (Kobayashi Kaoru) to the solitary, socially inept Majime. As he painstakingly strives to steer the insane project into existence, he earns the friendship of his colleagues including the woman-and-booze-loving Nishioka Masashi (Joe Odagiri), as well as finding love with Hayashi Kaguya (Miyazaki Aoi), his landlord's granddaughter. Achieving a fine balance between serious comedy and light drama, the film offers a moving meditation on the possibilities of teamwork, seeking worlds within words, and ultimately finding a reason to live.

Praised by Martin Scorsese and showered with awards at festivals around the world, this devastating portrait of South Korea's blame culture follows a high-school girl seeking anonymity and escape from the horrors of her past.

Inspired by a horrifying case of child rape in South Korea, Hope brings a fresh approach to a difficult subject matter, and by focusing on the victim's recovery, ultimately delivers flawless feel-good human drama.

Two enormous stars, a magical time-portal mailbox, and a house by the lake were all mixed into the melodrama pot in 2000 and out came Il Mare, which has since been cemented in the canon of Korean romances.

The star of Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and already an award-winning television director, Umin Boya, makes his feature-film directorial debut with the true story of Kagi Agriculture and Forestry Public School's baseball team. Known as the pioneers of Taiwanese baseball in the 1930s, this ragtag group of young players—made up of both Japanese and Taiwanese students—went from holding a losing record to playing in the finals of Japan's high-school baseball tournament in one year under the leadership of their new Japanese coach (Nagase Masatoshi). A love letter to the sport of baseball and imbued with the never-give-up spirit, this three-hour crowd-pleasing sports epic is a triumph of Taiwan cinema and one of the highest-grossing local films of all time.

Probably Kuei Chih-hung's masterpiece, this is the martial-arts movie served bleaker and angrier than ever before. Coming at the end of the new wuxia cycle that kicked off in 1967 with The One-Armed Swordsman, Killer Constable is a movie in which everyone is exhausted to the depths of their souls, every swordsman is a sadist, and every blade has to be bathed in blood before it's put away. Shaw Brothers legend Chen Kuan-tai out-grims the Grim Reaper playing a Qing Dynasty constable assigned by the empress to track down a stolen shipment of gold. Nothing stands in the way of his mission, not women, not children, not even his friends. Unfolding over a series of black, smoky, impressionistic wastelands, this is the kind of movie that's soaked in so much gore and drowning in so much despair you can barely breathe from the first frame to the last.

What starts out as a teen beach movie becomes a bloody take on the biker flick when a series of pranks between group of spoiled rich kids and a rowdy bunch of road rebels escalates out of control.

The latest and best Korean short films from the Mise en Scène Short Film Festival. Established by some of South Korea's biggest filmmakers including Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook, this festival has nurtured many industry professionals, including Yeon Sang-ho, director of King of Pigs.

Shaw Brothers teamed with Hammer Studios, England's House of Horror, on this kung-fu vampire movie starring Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and David Chiang as his Chinese counterpart.

We’ve been aching to show The Magic Blade for ages, and we’re thrilled that time has finally come. One of the finest wuxia films ever made (#85 on Time Out Hong Kong’s list of the Greatest Hong Kong Films of All Time), The Magic Blade is a near-perfect mixture of swordplay, fantasy, martial arts, heroic bloodshed (and we do mean bloodshed), and more Ti Lung greatness that any moviegoer could ever ask for. Adapted from Gu Long’s celebrated novel, The Magic Blade is a career highlight for both director Chor Yuen (with one of several Long novels he brought to the screen) and star Ti Lung, giving one of his finest performances, paired with an equally terrific Lo Lieh in some of the best choreographed fights in Shaw Brothers history. It remains one of the true classics of the entire Shaw Brothers library and is not be to be missed under any circumstances. So don’t.

Directed by visual artist Park Chan-kyong (Day Trip and Night Fishing, both co-directed with his brother Park Chan-wook), Manshin is a cinematic feast for the mind and the senses, a thought-provoking mystical journey into the psyche of Korea and its modern history through a life story of its most famous living shaman, Kim Keum-hwa. Both the life of Kim—who was born in 1931 and became a shaman at 17—and significant moments of modern Korea are chronicled through rare archival footage, performances of shamanistic "gut" rituals, dramatic reenactment of real stories (Moon So-ri portrays Kim in the 1970s), and even animation and fantasy sequences. Featuring original music by Korean indie band UhUhBoo Project (Night Fishing), Manshin transports viewers beyond the borders of past and present, South and North Korea, life and afterlife, reality and fantasy. It is unlike any other film you'll see at NYAFF this year.

To paraphrase Alicia Keys, "Some people live for the fortune / Some people live just for the fame." And some, well… some live to give themselves a good blowjob. Described by acclaimed actor/scriptwriter/director Kudo Kankuro (writer of Ping Pong and Zebraman) as a “self-fellatio” comedy, Maruyama is a deeply moving coming-of-age story, an exploration of the liberating possibilities of the human imagination, and a study of what it means to live with other people. The sole spine-cracking ambition in life of sex-crazed 14-year-old Maruyama (Hiraoka Takuma) is to lick his own weenie. Life is all fun, games, and stretching (lots of stretching) for Maruyama until he encounters a strange newcomer, a nerdy, busybody single father (Kusanagi Tsuyoshi) who systematically finds fault with his apartment-complex neighbors. Things take a weird turn when corpses are found in the otherwise quiet neighborhood, and Maruyama soon suspects that the odd fellow might actually be a mass murderer. As his imagination gets out of control, the inhabitants of the whole complex become the cast in an action-packed saga of assassinations and revenge. Reality becomes fantasy and vice versa, as the film becomes a full-on celebration of the adolescent spirit and the power of a hormone-fueled imagination.

Two teenagers—one a deaf-mute escort, the other junkie's daughter—come together to find their missing friend, a rich girl with a thing for bad boys, with the help of their smartphones in this teen drama turned gangland noir.

A rich family man receives a crate containing a mail-order zombie maid, an instruction manual, a cautionary note against letting her eat meat, and a gun (just in case) in this razor-sharp social satire.

A playfully twisted black comedy with no dialogue, Moebius is an everyday tale of penectomy, rape, sadomasochistic sex, and incestuous love from award-winning Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk.

With The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji, Japan's most prolific and most popular gonzo director, Miike Takashi, offers two-plus irresistibly frantic hours of undiluted insanity. An out-and-out balls-to-the-wall cops vs. yakuza farce, the film leaves respectability, restraint, and decency at the door. Improbably inept rookie cop Kikukawa Reiji (Ikuta Toma) wants to do the right thing but when he tries to bust a city councilor who's caught molesting a teenage girl he gets fired without much ceremony. He is quickly rehired by his superiors for what turns out to be a suicide undercover mission to infiltrate a brutal yakuza clan. After all, who would suspect such a moron to be a plant? Reiji starts donning a leopard-spotted suit with matching accessories, and soon befriends Crazy Papillon (Tsutsumi Shinichi, Why Don't You Play in Hell?), the No. 2 in the gang, and a man who also likes to keep it classy with cute little butterflies adorning his coat. Sharing Reiji's impeccable fashion sense and his distaste for drugs, they bond over a number of gangster-like predicaments, the way gangsters do, and together they face the diamond-toothed “cat” Nekozawa (Okamura Takashi) and his gang of cat-men. A monument to pop madness and perhaps, in more ways than one, an apotheosis of post-cinema cinema.

Japanese horror master Hideo Nakata (Ring, Dark Water) returns with this highly original paranormal thriller about two men with supernatural abilities, locked in a duel to the death.

The film that kicked off Hong Kong's hopping vampire fad and its turbo-charged, spiritual successor screen together as a demented, bloodthirsty double feature.

The relationship between a man and an adolescent girl brought together by a natural disaster goes from from emotional to erotic, from inchoate to inflamed, from serene to obscene, in this controversial love story.

A huge hit at the box office, New World elevates the popular Korean gangster genre with its fascinating and harrowing look at the power structures and politics of a criminal organization.

A smug legal grandstander must drive from Northwestern China to Beijing ASAP in this blackly comedic road movie and savvy indictment of capitalism that was shelved for four years after running afoul of Chinese censors.

The One-Armed Swordsman burst onto the scene in 1967 as riots swept the streets of Hong Kong and bombings pushed the city over the brink into chaos, channeling the people's anger and fury on screen.

After tackling insider trading and real estate conspiracies, Alan Mak and Felix Chong (Infernal Affairs) turn to the untamed rural villages of Hong Kong's New Territories in the third installment of the hugely popular Overheard series.

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 24th Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, Lisa Takeba's debut feature is a hyper-imaginative crazytown sci-fi drama about a slacker and his clone. Flashy, funky, and filled to the brim with genre influences of all kinds, The Pinkie is a uniquely entertaining comedy moving at breakneck speed with a plot that seems to be lifted straight out of another solar system. Ryosuke is drifting through life, but when he seduces a yakuza's mistress, the gangsters rough him up and chop off his pinkie. It comes into the possession of Momoko, a girl who has been stalking Ryosuke. She gets herself a cloning kit and grows her own Ryosuke-clone. The creature performs beyond expectations and proves to be a remarkable lover. Soon, hilarity and horror are sharing the same seat. Chock-full of Western and Japanese pop-culture references and packed with jokes ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, it's as if Sekiguchi Gen's Survive Style 5+ had been directed by the deranged minds behind the Sushi Typhoon splatter films with a view to mixing Weird Science, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and The Terminator into 65 concentrated minutes of weirdness.

This spin-off of Hong Kong's mighty Young & Dangerous series about young gangsters known as triads follows Sister 13 (Sandra Ng), a lesbian pimp who sports a spiky 'do and boss suits.

When a remorseless killer slashes an archetypal bad cop in an alleyway, it kicks off a relentless pursuit complete with graphic violence, vulgar comedy, and a healthy dose of Korean social satire.

Matsumoto Hitoshi is Japan's most famous comedian, but even if you've seen Big Man Japan and Symbol you'll barely be prepared for the S&M antics of this straight-faced send-up of genre cinema.

The film that kicked off Hong Kong's hopping vampire fad and its turbo-charged, spiritual successor screen together as a demented, bloodthirsty double feature.

A crazed actor takes his dedication to his craft too far when he threatens an actress, leading to a dramatic downfall fueled by narcissism and a rampant ego.

A cab driver makes a deal with a necromancer to exact revenge on the thugs who murdered his adulterous wife, but the ritual requires some serious sins of the flesh, in this grotesque 1983 Shaw Brothers shocker.

A girl wanders the mean streets of post-Soviet Vladivostok in pursuit of a hunky businessman who stood her up in Tokyo and ends up getting kidnapped by thugs in the latest from Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Tokyo Sonata, Penance).

When a millionaire's daughter stands trial for the murder of her future stepmother, layers of previously hidden information are revealed that ultimately elevate the tale into one of Chinese myth and personal redemption.

Powered by a complicated Chinese puzzle box of a murder plot, The Snow White Murder Case is helmed by the director of Fish Story and Golden Slumbers, both NYAFF/Japan Cuts favorites, and it's one of the best brain-teasers of the year. Based on a novel by best-selling author Minato Kanae (who wrote Confessions), the film dissects the odd goings-on behind the grim discovery of a burned-to-a-crisp corpse found in a national park near Tokyo. The victim is a young officer worker, Miki Noriko (played by ice-queen TV actress Nanao), whose stunning beauty was the object of much jealousy at the cosmetics company where she worked. The finger-pointing begins and suspicion soon turns to her plain-Jane co-worker Shirono Miki (Inoue Mao), who conveniently vanished after the murder, and is said to have harbored deep-seated feelings of envy toward her former trainee. As food blogger and part-time TV news journalist Akahoshi Yuji (Ayano Go) takes his private investigation to the rabid world of social media, the so-called Snow White Murder Case turns into an out-of-control witch hunt with a full-blown Twitter storm at its center. Brain-bending twists and turns take the viewer and the film toward the unknown and unsuspected, while the camera gives a cold and hard, but not humorless, look at the damage wrought by the pettiness of a passive-aggressive, totally connected society.

When a taciturn chef named Chuan collapses at work, he is brought to the country to recover and embarks on a killing spree. When confronted by his uncle, he claims to no longer be Chuan...

A disgraced TV news anchor demoted to hosting a radio call-in show sees an opportunity to turn his fate around when a man phones in, blows up a bridge, and claims to have other bombs hidden around Seoul.

A famous actor's manager gets his own chance to shine in front of the cameras and quickly rises, eventually eclipsing the fame of his former boss, in this send-up of the Korean film industry.

A moving, nostalgic portrait of the men behind the golden age of chanbara (sword-fighting dramas and films), Uzumasa Limelight—whose title refers to a Charlie Chaplin film about the twilight days of a stage actor—goes behind the scenes of Japan's most distinctive film genre. Its protagonist is a professional extra named Kamiyama, who has devoted 50 years of his life as a kirareyaku in sword-fighting movies produced at Kyoto's Uzumasa Studios. His specialty? He lives to die. Or more exactly "to be cut" and die a beautiful, spectacular death on the silver screen. Kamiyama, played by real-life kirareyaku Fukumoto Seizo, whose imposing physical presence dominates the film from start to finish, has become a master of the art, with his own signature style of falling down dead. Now an elderly man, he lives in very modest circumstances, but has earned immense respect from his more prominent peers, some of them movie stars. When the studio decides to discontinue its chanbara productions, Kamiyama finds himself at a loss: what will he do for the rest of his life? How can he use his specialized skills? Hope arrives in the form a young girl named Satsuki (Yamamoto Chihiro), who soon becomes Kamiyama's disciple. Will the art of dying by the sword live on?

One part Reefer Madness, one part John Woo action bromance, The White Storm is piled high with gunfights, male bonding, car crashes, snappy action, super melodrama, handsome cops, and intense style.

A back-to-bloody-basics film that pay tribute to old-school yakuza cinema and low-budget amateur filmmaking, Why Don't You Play in Hell? is based on a screenplay that bad-boy director Sono Sion (a NYAFF/Japan Cuts guest in 2009) wrote 17 years ago. Devoting most of their time and frantic energy to guerrilla filmmaking antics, it seems like it might be time for the "Fuck Bombers" to move on. A group of jobless film geeks, they're trying to turn Sasaki (Sakaguchi Tak), a young brawler, into their "new Bruce Lee," but the Bombers are nowhere near getting their action masterpiece made. New blood and inspiration come their way when an ambush set by a yakuza clan comes to a gory end in the home of boss Muto (Kunimura Jun), and is witnessed by Mitsuko, Muto's 10-year-old daughter and star of a toothpaste commercial. Ten years later, she's become a sultry, mean mess of a girl (played by 2014 Screen International Rising Star Award recipient, Nikaido Fumi). Determined to make his little girl a star, her father, fresh out of jail, crosses path with the gang of wannabe filmmakers, and gives the losers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shoot their movie. To make this happen, the yakuza becomes the film production crew and the Fuck Bombers join the "real" action. Needless to say, things are about to get messy. In what Sono himself called "an action film about the love of 35mm," you'll definitely feel the love. And the blood.

The new film from Shinobu Yaguchi, the director of Water Boys, is based on Miura Shion's bestseller, a bittersweet coming-of-age novel dealing with forestry (the wood job of the title… nothing dirty there), which earned praise from Studio Ghibli's very own Miyazaki Hayao. A slim, simple, and wistful feature, Wood Job! follows protagonist Hirano Yuki (Sometani Shota), a high-school graduate so ordinary he is, in fact, way below average. After failing his university entrance exams he comes across a brochure with a sexy girl on the cover that advertises a one-year forestry program and he immediately drops his life and heads to Kamusari, a backwater village nestled deep in the mountains, far from civilization, convenience stores, and cell-phone coverage. There he meets mountain man Iida (Ito Hideaki) and learns to love their Thoreau-like lifestyle in the wild. A simple, human movie, it's a far cry from the apocalyptic $200 million blockbusters and Hollywood destruction orgies that are currently clogging screens, and Japanese audiences responded to its message, turning it into a word-of-mouth hit.

A failed actress on the run from debt collectors moves back home, opens a catering business, and enters a cooking contest with a million-dollar prize in this colorful and mouth-watering delight.