With its cool monochrome, nonchalant protagonist, freshness of tone and naturalistic feel, Kisses has as much to do with European neo-realism as it does with Japanese cinema, and was no doubt influenced by Masumura’s stint as a student at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome in the 1950s.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

‘Between man and woman, it’s a fight to the death’, declares one of her many lovers to Otsuya, Irezumi’s geisha heroine. This piece of fierce wisdom informs many of Yasuzo Masumura’s films, from Blind Beast, which climaxes in a frenzied S&M coupling, to Manji, in which a married couple’s rivalry for the love of a young woman leads them to self-destruct, but nowhere is it as clear as in Irezumi, the story of a woman turned predatory prostitute.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

Although Yasuzo Masumura was a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, his work has been incomprehensibly neglected in the West. This is a man who was a precursor of the Japanese New Wave and a pioneer of the kind of extreme cinema that has made Takashi Miike famous, a wildly imaginative filmmaker who has no less than 58 films to his credit and is responsible for some of the most savagely beautiful, erotically-charged images ever committed to celluloid, and yet he has been treated until now as little more than a footnote in film history.
Review by Virginie Sélavy

The same can by no means be said of Masumura’s Red Angel, which is a much more perverse though, for very different reasons, no less conflicted account of the plight of a nurse from Tokyo working in a series of field hospitals in China during the 1939 Sino-Japanese war.
Review by Jeff Hilson

From the very first frame, Masumura’s Blind Beast is as visually arresting as it is morally dubious, and it doesn’t let up pursuing its own preposterous logic for a second from then on in. What more can you ask of a film?
Review by Stephen Thomson