Instant Favorite.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A musical biopic of the blind shamisen (a Japanese string instrument) player Chikuzan Takahashi. Narratively, it's pretty standard - one might call it the Japanese Ray and not be too far off. But it's well acted and well shot, with a lot of interesting settings and period detail (the setting is early 20th Century rural Japan, up to WWII). Ryuzo Hayashi stars as Chikuzan. Kaneto Shindo's wife and frequent star Nobuko Otowa co-stars as Chikuzan's mother. Well worth checking out if you can find it. This was nominated for the Japanese Academy award for Best Picture in the first year of its existence, but lost to Yoji Yamada's The Yellow Handkerchief.