Cinema

Japan, 2011, 108 mins. Director: Masahiko Murata

Our hero Naruto is convicted of several heavy crimes. As a result he is sent to a prison, where the warden has restricted chakra usage on all the prisoners.

There is more to this warden than meets the eye. Unbenoweth to him there are very intrigueing events taking place. As he fights for his freedom he becomes entangled in a story of sacrifice, regret and love. Can Naruto prove his innocence and help fix the trouble in the prison?

Japan, 2012, 109 mins. Director: Hayato Date

Long ago, a mysterious masked shinobi unleashed the Nine-Tailed Fox onto the Village Hidden in the Leaves to spread chaos and destruction. But the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze, and his wife Kushina Uzumaki sealed the Tailed Beast into their newborn son Naruto to save the village, foiling the shinobi's plan.

Years later, Naruto and his friends succeed in driving away the infamous Akatsuki, who have mysteriously returned from the dead. Upon returning to the village, the young shinobi are praised by their families for completing a dangerous mission.

Reminded of how alone he is, Naruto begins to wonder what it's like to have parents, when a strange masked figure appears before him - the same masked shinobi responsible for the death of his parents!

Japan, 2013, 126 mins. Director: Hayao Miyazaki

In "The Wind Rises," Jiro dreams of flying and designing beautiful airplanes, inspired by the famous Italian aeronautical designer Caproni. Nearsighted from a young age and unable to be a pilot, Jiro joins a major Japanese engineering company in 1927 and becomes one of the world's most innovative and accomplished airplane designers.

Japan, 2013, 99 mins. Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura

Time of Eve director Yasuhiro Yoshiura is a perspective-twisting sci-fi adventure about two kids separated by opposite gravities. Patema lives in an underground world of tunnels, the long-abandoned ruins of a giant industrial complex.

Though she is a princess, she is held back by the rules imposed by the elders of her clan. One day when she is exploring in a forbidden zone, she is startled by a strange bat-like creature and tumbles headlong into a void - and out into the wide open world above the surface, a place with reversed physics, where if she let go she would "fall up" into the sky and be lost forever. Age is a student on this surface world, a totalitarian society whose compliant population has been brainwashed against the "sinners who fell into the sky." When he spies Patema hanging upside-down from a tree, he pulls her down to safety, struggling with all his might to keep her earthbound as she grips on to him for dear life. Together their weights cancel each other out, and once they master the art of navigating competing gravitational forces, they set out to evade the leaders of Age's world and discover the secret that keeps their worlds apart.

Japan, 2012, 77 mins. Director: Toshiyuki Kubooka

An epic trilogy gets underway in this sweeping medieval adventure that finds lone-wolf fortune hunter Guts recruited into a mercenary group dubbed "The Band of the Hawk," but questioning the impetus of the team's leader Griffith following a decisive victory on the battlefield. Meanwhile, a dark storm begins to gather on the horizon.

Based on the bestselling manga by author Kentaro Miura (Noa, King of Wolves).

Japan, 2012, 120 mins. Director: Hiroyuki Okiura

From the creators of Ghost in the Shell comes a wonderfully expressive and beautifully hand drawn animated tale that combines bursts of whimsy and kinetic humor with deep felt emotion and drama. The last time Momo saw her father they had a fight - and now all she has left to remember him by is an incomplete letter, a blank piece of paper penned with the words "Dear Momo" but nothing more. Moving with her mother to the remote Japanese island of Shio, Momo soon discovers three yokai living in her attic, a trio of mischievous spirit creatures that only she can see and who create mayhem in the tiny seaside community as she tries desperately to keep them hidden. But these funny monsters have a serious side and may hold the key to helping Momo discover what her father had been trying to tell her.

A Letter to Momo was seven years in the making, and the handmade animation is superb, from the painstakingly rendered serenity of the island's Shinto shrines to the climactic finale - a frantic chase featuring thousands of squirming, morphing ghosts and spirits that is the best cinematic flight of supernatural fancy in many years.