For his fourth full feature, Toyoshi Toyoda has abandoned the theme of the angry young man, examined in depth in Pornostar, Blue Spring and 9 Souls. Kuchu Teien is, on the face of it, more a drama, a character study, than a typical Toyoda genre flick. Yet within this beautifully structured and photographed film, there lies a dark soul. Ostensibly the story of a happy family, it becomes increasingly clear as the movie progresses that the Kyobashis are anything but. Despite a family agreement that they are all open with each other, the entire household knows the opposite is true.
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Follows Helen and her daughter Lauren, who go on a trip to an isolated cabin in the cold north and meet a hitchhiker who actually is a thief trying to evade a cold-blooded killer, and now Helen and Lauren are on the murderer’s radar too.
A naive young husband must face down his obsessive and psychotic friend when their plan to elicit a confession from his adulterous wife ends in murder.
A small town waitress gets a nail accidentally lodged in her head causing unpredictable behavior that leads her to Washington, DC. Sparks fly when she meets a clueless young senator who takes up her cause – but what happens when love interferes with what you stand for?
College student Beca knows she does not want to be part of a clique, but that’s exactly where she finds herself after arriving at her new school. Thrust in among mean gals, nice gals and just plain weird gals, Beca finds that the only thing they have in common is how well they sing together. She takes the women of the group out of their comfort zone of traditional arrangements and into a world of amazing harmonic combinations in a fight to the top of college music competitions.
A 40-year-old writer returns to his family house where he was raised and that he escaped after half a lifetime – to face his brother who stayed instead, inherited their family bakery and married the woman who they both loved.
A naive country girl is tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer, then must rebuild her life despite the taint of having borne a child out of wedlock.
During the 18th century, German noblewoman Sophia Frederica, who would later become Catherine the Great, travels to Moscow to marry the dimwitted Grand Duke Peter, the heir to the Russian throne. Their arranged marriage proves to be loveless, and Catherine takes many lovers, including the handsome Count Alexei, and bears a son. When the unstable Peter eventually ascends to the throne, Catherine plots to oust him from power.
Set in the future in a time of interplanetary colonization, an unlikely pair race against an impending global crisis and are confronted by the monsters that live inside us all.
