Koreyoshi Kurahara’s ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The…

A runaway cat-loving girl begins a love triangle with a reckless older man and a young biker in high school. The film follows their subsequent chaotic relationships.

In the summer of 1947, various men and women gather at a mansion in the countryside at the invitation of Kazuma Utagawa. They are artists, novelists, poets, painters, playwrights, actresses,…

Akira and Hiroshi are two lowlives who work at a pachinko parlour. Hiroshi is a ladies’ man but always loses at pachinko. Akira is a virgin at 25 but always…

At a seaside city somewhere in the Tohoku area, the corpses of Nozomi, daughter of an affluent family, and Yamazaki, son of an engineer at the local nuclear power-plant, are…

Based on a novel by Tsutomu Mizukami, this haunting melodrama focuses on a young bamboo worker who takes his father’s prostitute as his wife.

Hell manifests itself through the sins, shame and desires of an upper class rural family and a mother’s grief from beyond the grave.

When Sokichi stops providing his long-time lover Kikuyo enough money to pay for the care of their three young children, Kikuyo leaves the children with Sokichi – and his very…

A young female samurai comes upon a dying messenger and agrees to deliver the scroll he was carrying to its destination. However, unbeknownst to her, the scroll is actually a…

A greedy developer, in league with a corrupt Shrine Magistrate, brutally tries to drive people out of a tenement building and destroy the shrine in back. But he makes the…

Misawa Ihei (Nagato) is traveling with his wife Tae (Iwashita Shima) who abhors the practice of sword fighting for prize money. Tae is the daughter of the clan’s chief counselor…

Zatoichi comes upon a dying man who asks him to give a bag of money to “Taichi”. Zatoichi has no idea who this is but when he comes upon a…

A film about the substantial population of Koreans living in Japan, and the love affair between Kayako, a Japanese girl, and Im, a Korean.

This sensuously beautiful film chronicles the activities of four sisters who gather in Kyoto every year to view the cherry blossoms. It paints a vivid portrait of the pre-war lifestyle…

Chieko (Momoe Yamaguchi) has been raised as the only child of parents who run a dry goods store. When Chieko was a middle-school student, she learned that her parents are…

A blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her.

The myth of the Sun Goddess who founded Japanese society is seen through the lens of a modern view of history.

In the third film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Ogami Itto volunteers to be tortured by Yakuza to save a prostitute and is hired by their leader to…

A young man goes missing after visiting his girlfriend’s isolated country home. His sister and her boyfriend trace him to the creepy mansion, but their search becomes perilous when they…

Kiroku boards with a Roman Catholic family and falls for the daughter Michiko. He ignores his feelings, joins a gang, gets in fights and, eventually, becomes involved with the radical…

A nuclear explosion in the far north unleashes Gamera, the legendary flying turtle, from his sleep under the ice. In his search for energy, Gamera wreaks havoc over the entire…

In Edo Japan, a kabuki actor seeks revenge against the three men who drove his parents to their deaths years ago.

Ushimatsu’s father told him never to reveal his lower-caste heritage; years later, he now contemplates confiding in an activist fighting against such discrimination.

An opportunistic department store clerk gets involved with three women and attempts to manipulate them so he can move up the social ladder.

Towards the end of the Second World War, a downed U.S. pilot is captured and imprisoned by rural Japanese villagers, who await official instructions as to how to proceed with…

Ryoji, a wanderer, arrives in a remote mountain town, carrying a shotgun and claiming to be a hunter. He quickly becomes embroiled in a web of trouble surrounding the town’s…

When two sisters fall in love with the same man, one must decide to look elsewhere.

A budding gangster enthralls a freeloading young woman, soon taking advantage of her knack for hitch-hiking to rob middle-class, middle-aged men.

In Burma during the closing days of WWII, a Japanese soldier separated from his unit disguises himself as a Buddhist monk to escape imprisonment as a POW.