There is an old Chinese proverb: “Three may keep a secret, so long as two are dead”, Paolo Sorrentino’s sophomore feature film, The Consequences of Love, presents its own spin on this truism: “When two people know a secret, it’s no longer a secret.” Total isolation of the truth is the only way to keep the truth concealed and this sense of isolation extends into various facets of Sorrentino’s film - characters, visuals and narrative.

Nobody Knows is the most widely seen of Hirokazu Koreeda’s films, a possible reason for this is its dramatic premise: Children in Jeopardy. This premise is almost always guaranteed to peak wider interest, David Simon credited the success of The Wire’s fourth season to this factor especially amongst American audiences.

Modern Japanese Cinema has been dominated by two names (animation not withstanding); Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike, but in recent years both have become decreasingly successful at wooing international audiences and arguably peaked in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Kitano hasn’t had a major release in the UK since Zatoichi (2003) and Miike, although remaining a very prolific filmmaker, hasn’t directed a film of significant note since Ichi the Killer (2001).

WARNING: Contains spoilers for both films throughout.

Sir Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, implying that every scientific success is based entirely on the success of those who have come before. This statement can, and regularly is, transposed into other areas of human endeavor such as philosophy or art.

French director Erick Zonca wanted to make a film which would begin as a portrait of a woman then slowly change gears and become a thriller about kidnapping and violence. Zonca has completely succeeded as his 2008 film Julia is a particularly impressive character piece which organically develops into something rather more generic in its second half.

Structure is often considered to be of vital importance to the process of creating a narrative. Structure has been meticulously examined and explored in relation to drama for thousands of years. Famously the process began with Aristotle’s Poetics, the oldest surviving analysis of dramatic principles and effectively the birth place of critical theory in relation to literature and theatre, critical theory which would eventually be applied to cinema.

WARNING: Contains Spoilers throughout.

There is arguably no single component of film that is lacking in importance, from the art design to the cinematography, from the performance to the direction - every individual element of film informs the whole. The majority of the time the films we consider classics or masterpieces of cinema are the ones that succeed in every area.

DVD special features are often filled (or perhaps the correct word is “littered”) with ‘Making of’ documentaries, these frequently self-congratulatory gigabyte fillers are present to help sell the film in question, something to list on the back of the DVD to help convince the viewing public to part with their hard earned cash for the disc in question.

WARNING: Contains Spoilers Throughout

Film is often considered a director’s medium, it is an art form which showcases a number of different artistic, creative and technical talents, but none more so than that of the director. Or at least, that’s the way it appears to most. In the same way that Theatre is considered a writer’s medium, or Reality Television is considered a casting medium, cinema is director-centric and shows no signs of changing.

The Director: Akira Kurosawa is arguably Japan’s most influential and famous film maker, a man whose directorial career spanned six decades starting with Judo Story in 1943 and ending with Not Yet in 1993. He is often praised by world cinema enthusiasts as one of the titans of the art house circuit; however in reality the majority of his works have more populist ambitions than say the poetics of Andrei Tarkovsky or the biographical explorations of Ingmar Bergman.