Machine Girl is all the proof you need that low-budget exploitation cinema is alive and well. Instead of looking for it in the now-demolished fleapit theaters of Times Square, it’s coming to you in the comfort of one’s own living room, by way of Japan. This is not a bad thing. Exploitation movies are designed to go over the top, and Machine Girl not only goes over the top, it tears the top off, sets it on fire, and throws it back at you.

We are, after all, talking about a movie where a teenaged girl gets one arm amputated by gangsters, then attaches a super-tommy gun to the stump and goes to town on her tormentors. Heads gets blown apart. Limbs are hacked off. Holes are blown through torsos and weapons fired through the holes. Gorehounds won’t just be delighted; they’ll be smacking their foreheads and laughing in disbelief at some of the stuff the filmmakers pull here. But it’s all more surreal and hallucinatory than anything else, and after a while you’re not so much grossed out as amazed at how much they’re able to jam into a mere ninety minutes of running time.

Sunshine takes a movie premise that has been done to death and does it so well that it almost feels like this idea has never been tried before. There’s a whole subgenre of movies where an intrepid crack team of scientists / adventurers / total lunatics embark on a mission to save the world by going all the way the heck out into the unknown, and most of them are pretty terrible: Armageddon and The Core come most recently to mind. Sunshine stands out by being a) not terrible by a long shot, b) grounded in as much physical reality as most Hollywood pictures can stand to get away with, and c) using the adventure premise of the story as a lead-in to something bigger and deeper.

The premise: The sun is dying (why? Eh, don’t ask), and a space mission has been sent out to reignite it with a special bomb. A previous mission was lost without a trace several years ago, which makes this attempt—codenamed “Icarus II”—all the more urgent. So far everything has been going according to schedule, but not long after Icarus II passes the point where it can no longer communicate with Earth, the crew picks up a strange signal—Icarus I’s distress beacon. They’re tempted to investigate, but Captain Kaneda (none other than Hiroyuki Sanada) says no: “Nothing, literally nothing, is more important than this mission.” Shotgun foreshadowing, to be sure, but only in retrospect.

The Mystery of Rampo is a rare creature: a truly original movie, blessed with a fearless imagination and a delirious visual style. It helps somewhat to know from where the film has mined its imagery and inspirations, but I don’t think it’s crucial: the spell Rampo casts all by itself is powerful enough to bewitch most any receptive audience.

The Host is another great example of what I love most about Korean movies: it’s a creature-feature, a family drama, a snotty satire and a thrill ride, all at the same time. It’s hard enough to make a movie in any one of those tones, but somehow Bong Joon-ho (director of the equally-excellent Memories of Murder) manages to round all four bases without stumbling. He accomplishes the same trick that Steven Spielberg did with the original Jaws, but in a slightly broader and more comic way: he makes you care about the people onscreen, too, so when the monster appears it’s not just chasing human chum.

Host stars one of my favorite Korean actors, Kang-Ho Song (he of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, JSA, Shiri, and Memories of Murder itself) as Gang-du, a shiftless fellow who runs a snack stand with his father, daughter and sister on the banks of Seoul’s Han River. He’s not much of a worker—in fact, he’s not much of anything—but he dearly loves his daughter Hyun-seo and does little things for her like sock away spare change to buy her a new cellphone. (Never mind most of that money has been skimmed from the till.) His father, Hee-bong (Hie-bong Byeon), indulges all of them, especially his son, now that there’s no mother around to do that job for them.

Here is another of Japan’s loveliest and most sorrowful of films, restored to life and freed from the patina of decades of damage that hid its beauty. Sansho the Bailiff was one of the first Japanese movies I rented as part of my cinematic education about Japan, a process which started with a theatrical screening of Kurosawa’s Ran back in 1985 and has persisted to this day. Like director Kenji Mizoguchi’s equally-saddening Ugetsu (another movie I saw at the same time, possibly back-to-back with it), the only copies available were VHS transfers; I was unlucky enough to rent a copy of Sansho that sported nasty creases in the tape for the first five minutes. The luminous beauty of the movie still showed through despite all that, and I longed for a day when I could see it again without multiple generations of print damage and analog tape artifacts obscuring it. Here we are at last.

This is the Bond movie they should have made all along. Casino Royale brings the James Bond franchise to where it always needed to be; it's to Bond what Batman Begins (or perhaps Batman: Year One) was to that comic-book hero. If they never make another Batman movie I will not be unhappy, and if they never make another Bond film I will always have this one. Harlan Ellison once lavished praise on one of Philip Jose Farmer's stories in his Dangerous Visions collection by saying that it was "the best--no, make that the finest story in this book." That degree of praise was tailor-made for this film, as it's both the best and the finest of the Bonds thus far.

There is a moment near the end of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs when the main character, Keiko (Hideko Takamine), a Tokyo bar hostess, is asked if she loves someone, and her response is: “I neither love him nor hate him.” Keiko has spent so much of her time and strength purging herself of emotion that when real love is finally offered to her, she has no idea what to do with it. For most of her adult life she has perched on barstools next to middle-aged men of all stripes—bankers and office-workers and industrialists—and poured their drinks and pretended to be more wifely to them than their actual wives. She has done this for years out of the hope that maybe she’ll be able to sock away enough money to open up her own bar—which, aside from marriage, is about the most a woman in her situation could expect to find. And, she reasons, who would want to marry her? Surely no one who is entirely honest with themselves.

Baian the Assassin is an above-average example of the sort of TV fare that’s popular in Japan but not an animated production, which is what most American audiences are used to as far as such Japanese imports go. It’s something to file next to stuff like the Zatôichi movies or TV series, and it’s directly reminiscent of it in many ways: A man of a certain social status dispenses his own brand of justice in feudal Japan and makes sure the wicked come to a sticky end. In this case, the hero’s no a blind masseur, but a doctor, Baian-sensei (Ken Watanabe, whom most of us will know from The Last Samurai), whose clinic is always crowded with those in need of his aid. His other job is that of an assassin, where he uses his acupuncturist’s needles to inflict a death blow to those who have ground the innocent and helpless underfoot.

The fun thing about Baian (which, again, like Zatôichi, was adapted from a series of novels) is how it depicts its main character and relishes the little details of its setting just as much as the big ones. Baian gets all of his assignments through a go-between, the motojime, who pays him piles of money and describes his targets to him. If he doesn’t take the job, he can always give it to his friend Hikojiro, the toothpick maker—another assassin-by-night, whose killing specialty is a blowgun dart to the eye. Most of those marked for death are haughty samurai, but there are more than a few greedy merchants—both male and female—who get marked for one of Baian’s needles in the back of the neck.

Now here’s something I would never have expected: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the animated movie version of one of the lesser novels in the Vampire Hunter D series, is not only better than the original book but in some ways better than many of the novels in the series as a whole. The novel in question, Demon Deathchase, was a flashy but fairly thin vehicle for its main character—a half-human, half-vampire hunter of the undead in a vaguely Mad Max-ian far-flung post-collapse future. It was no great shakes as a story, but it wasn’t hard to see how it could lend itself easily to a terrific action film.

If Trinity Blood was an example of an anime where they took a great idea and wasted it, Shinobi is the live-action version of the same sort of mistake. It is a period ninja-fantasy adventure with a game cast, based on a bestselling novel, and my god is it ever boring as hell. Sorry, gang, but that’s the way it is. The movie is all promise and no payoff.

I gave the movie a chance, honest. I let Shinobi unspool for two hours without feeling it strike a single neuron, without a single surprise that I hadn’t seen coming miles off, and when it was done I could not remember a single image, a single line of dialogue, a single scene that had held my interest in more than the most fleeting way. How is it that Japan can use the samurai / period-adventure genre to produce some of the most compelling, visually striking and all-around inventive films—Gojoe, or Takeshi Kitano’s Zatôichi—but then turn around and come up with a complete wet dog of a picture like this? Probably because Gojoe and Zatôichi were the products of artists with vision, and Shinobi is a piece of made-to-order piffle.