A documentary by Mike Wilson.
From Michael Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan to the movie-making capital of the United States, director Mike Wilson's inflammatory documentary travels across the country to hold the controversial Sicko director's allegedly questionable tactics up to the light for closer examination. Wilson is a filmmaker who wants viewers to question what they see and hear in the media, and he's willing to travel thousands of miles in order to highlight why you too should remain skeptical about Moore's motivations as a filmmaker. The result is a meditation on the American Dream, and the manner in which diligence and determination can eventually pay off for the folks who aren't willing to let their dreams fade. Additionally, by speaking with such well known media figures as Penn Jilette and John Stossel as well as a host of highly respected scholars, Wilson highlights how Moore manipulates interviews and statistics to serve his own personal agenda.

Praised by critics from Susan Sontag to Tom Wolfe, Donald Richie is the foremost writer on Japanese culture in English. Born in Ohio in 1924, he has lived in Japan since 1947, except for time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968–73. The author of some thirty books and dozens of essays, Richie is especially well known for his instrumental role in introducing Japanese film to the West and for his travel memoir The Inland Sea, which was adapted into a popular PBS documentary.

Directed by Spike Jonze. Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. Starring Nicolas Cage.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is a trip. Ever since he burst onto the scene with the kooky Being John Malkovich, the screenwriter could get a grocery list made into a movie. The main reason for his popularity with film critics is obvious: they like his screenplay’s unpredictability. Actually, the only thing you can predict about a Kaufman screenplay is that you won’t be able to predict it. His screenplays, like his films, always seem to represent a stream of consciousness rather than a structured narrative.

Buta To Gunkan (1961) Pigs And Battleships
Nippon Konchuki (1963) The Insect Woman
Akai Satsui (1964) Intentions Of Murder
In the 1960s, Japanese filmmakers responded to a stale studio system by looking for fresh ways to tell stories, and Shohei Imamura was one of the leading figures of this new wave. With the three films in this set—Buta To Gunkan (Pigs and Battleships), Nippon Konchuki (The Insect Woman), and Akai Satsui (Intentions of Murder)—Imamura truly emerged as an auteur, bringing to his national cinema an anthropological eye and a previously unseen taste for the irreverent. Claiming his interests lay in “the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure,” Imamura dotted the decade with earthy, juicy, idiosyncratic films featuring persevering, willful heroines. His remains a unique cinematic voice.

In this pitch-black action comedy by Kihachi Okamoto, a pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, previously a farmer, longs to become a noble samurai. The other, a former samurai haunted by his past, prefers living anonymously with gangsters. But when both men discover the wrongdoings of the nefarious clan leader, they side with a band of rebels who are under siege at a remote mountain cabin. Based on the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Kill! playfully tweaks samurai film convention, borrowing elements from established chanbara classics and seasoning them with a little Italian western.

Gauche (Gôshu) is a young man who lives in a small house outside of town and plays the cello in the local orchestra. Unfortunately, Gauche's playing is letting down the rest of the orchestra and the conductor is running out of patience with him. Over the next few nights, however, Gauche is visited in his home by a succession of animals with musical requests for him - a cat, a bird, a raccoon dog and a mouse - much to Gauche's annoyance. What Gauche doesn't realise is that these tasks and encounters are teaching him how to overcome the flaws in his playing in the last few days before the big concert.

Rashômon (1950) was the film that first garnered Kurosawa widespread international attention, winning the 1952 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The story is both surprisingly simple and deceptively complex. The central tale, which tells of the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of a man (Masayuki Mori), possibly by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), is presented entirely in flashbacks from the perspectives of four narrators. The framing portions of the film transpire at Kyoto's crumbling Rashomon gate, where several people seek shelter from a pelting rain storm and discuss the recent crime, which has shocked the region. One of the men, a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), was a witness to the events, and, with the help of a priest (Minoru Chiaki), he puzzles over what really happened, and what such a horrible occurrence says about human nature.

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Starring Toshirô Mifune.
Includes choice of two alternative English subtitles by Linda Hoaglund and Donald Richie.
You come to a film like Cobweb Castle slightly cowed. The names Akira Kurosawa and William Shakespeare are enough to make the most pompous film buff swoon. After all, how could you not acknowledge this duo's supreme reign over the worlds of foreign film and drama? It simply has to be stunning, right?

Zatoichi TV Series - Grand Finale
Starring: Shintarō Katsu
These two episodes were written and directed by one of Japan's most distinguished filmmakers Hiroshi Teshigahara, and elevate the Blind Swordsman from genre hero to fine art. After 25 feature films from 1962 through 1973, the television series lasted 5 years (1974-79) and helped keep alive the legend of the blind wandering gambler/masseur with the lightning fast sword.

Japanese / International title: Seppuku. American title: Harakiri
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai.
Kobayashi's powerful indictment of social structures, in this case the Tokugawa shogunate, which demolish the individual's dignity in favor of authoritarian rule, is a superb film. Set in 1630 near the beginning of the famous shogunate's rule, Seppuku (Harakiri) exposes Tom Cruise's vain attempt at multiculturalism, The Last Samurai, for what it is - a mindless narrative based on inane American notions of the samurai. Kobayashi's film is a subtle, astute tale full of outrage and profundity.

Directed by Kihachi Okamoto.
Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune star in the story of a wandering samurai who exists in a maelstrom of violence. A gifted swordsman—plying his trade during the turbulent final days of Shogunate rule—Ryunosuke (Nakadai) kills without remorse, without mercy. It is a way of life that ultimately leads to madness...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
In 1961, Akira Kurosawa borrowed the plot of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest and filmed the incredibly influential Yojimbo. The tale is elegantly simple: A lone samurai (Toshiro Mifune) takes on a corrupt town run by two rival clans of gangsters. The pristine transfer, beaucoup bonuses and inclusion of the sequel, Sanjuro, make this boxed set a cinephile's dream. Each film features an audio commentary by film buff Stephen Prince.

Directed by Mamoru Hosoda.
After one day discovering that she has the special ability to 'leap' back in time, a high-school girl named Makoto Konno decides to use her newfound powers for trivial purposes such as getting to school early, eating pudding and singing in a karaoke rental for prolonged hours.

In what arguably sounds like the most humdrum plot ever conceived, it's almost surprising that Mamoru Hosoda's first directorial venture with Madhouse turned out to be the real winner that it is. In what seems to be the first of two successful anime film-adaptations of original stories written by Yasutaka Tsutsui this year (2007 in the US), The Girl Who Leapt Through Time demonstrates that creativity can make even the most primordial of storytelling devices (in this case, the quagmire of contradiction and convenience that is time-travel) relevant, intelligible and a whole lot of fun.

Face Value is the title of Phil Collins' debut solo album, released in February 1981. The album includes one of Collins' biggest, and perhaps most enduring hits, "In the Air Tonight". The album itself reached #1 in the UK, Canada, and many European countries, also meeting the U.S. Top 10.

Scans also provided.
Isaac Hayes surprised many in the film and R&B/soul world when he produced, arranged and composed the music for Shaft. Only three of the 15 tracks featured vocals, and Hayes displayed a finesse and capability with strings and mood pieces that his fans already knew he possessed from earlier albums, but which the general audience might have missed. This was a number 1 pop album and eventually earned Hayes an Oscar.
Links for Remastered version added to this post for comparison of two versions.