Nagisa Oshima's Empire of Passion is being promoted as the companion piece to his 1976 cause celebre, In the Realm of the Senses…. [They] both grimly depict the wages of sex as death. But whereas the marathon claustro-carnality of the earlier film made it a monumental, half-cracked tour-de-force—the La Region Central of hardcore porn—Empire of Passion is a banal, meandering will-o'-the-wisp….

Empire of Passion begins promisingly but, like an unwelcome guest, grows simultaneously shriller and more sluggish as it edges towards the door. Oshima makes elaborate use of the changing seasons; there are a half dozen striking shots (mostly taken from the bottom of the well where the unquiet corpse has been pitched); but the bottom line is a botched James M. Cain plot with a less-than-eerie overlay. The Rickshaw Man Always Rings Twice, one colleague called it. Would that twice were all it was.

J. Hoberman...