Called “The Godard of Japan,” for his explosive mixture of radical politics, baroque style, and absurdist dramatics, Nagisa Oshima (Boy, In the Realm of the Senses) is universally considered the most important force in modern Japanese cinema. In The Ceremony, what starts out looking like one of those long and formal family sagas the Japanese love so well snowballs into the horror and violence of the ripest Jacobean dramas: bizarre set-piece scenes pile onto one another in a vertiginous indictment of the madness of contemporary Japan.