Showtimes: 6/23, 8:45pm and 6/26, 9:15pm at the Anthology [BUY TICKETS]

THE TASTE OF TEA is a psychedelic version of Ingmar Bergman's FANNY AND ALEXANDER and a lysergic homage to Yasujiro Ozu's human portraits of Japanese family life. The Haruno family has moved to the countryside and are quietly living their lives. That's the movie right there. No more and no less. Mom is sitting at the kitchen table, working on the handmade animated epic that'll give her re-entry into the anime industry she left behind to raise her kids. Dad is a workaholic hypno-therapist who practices on his family. The teenaged son is awash in exploding hormones that have transformed him into a sweating, panting bucket of love, ready to chase down whomever the latest love of his life is and declare his passion. Grandpa is obsessed with starting a band. And nine-year old Sachiko is haunted by a 60-foot-tall doppelganger of herself. When their uncle (played by Tadanobu Asano from ICHI THE KILLER) comes to visit, he's just one more weirdo in the family gallery.

But the movie isn't a freakshow. While it's drunk on visual images (a train emerges from someone's head, giant sunflowers bloom, orange-clad dancers appear) THE TASTE OF TEA is about every family, because when you try to describe even the most sedate family to an outsider, they tend to come across sounding like the Munsters. Directed by Katsuhito Ishii (who directed the anime segment in KILL BILL vol. 1), this movie is an emotionally generous flick that's packed with more magic realism than a dozen Latin American novels and is one of the surprise finds of this year's festival. With every character's ramshackle inner life spread across the screen in a mesmerizing series of setpieces, the Haruno family is an attention span black hole: even the most mundane details suck you in and keep you fixated. In telling the story of the daily lives of this one family, THE TASTE OF TEA manages to be truly universal.