Dragnet Girl
A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him.
The Moon Has Risen
Mokichi is the widowed father of three daughters, with whom he lives on the premises of a temple since the war. All three daughters become involved in some sort of…
Forever a Woman
Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides…
Sandakan No. 8
A young journalist interviews an elderly woman about being forced into prostitution in Borneo at a brothel called Sandakan No. 8.
Alone Across the Pacific
Kenichi Horie is determined to challenge his family, the law and the nature crossing the Pacific to America in a small sailboat. Despite his careful planning many unforeseen events will…
The Ballad of Narayama
In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old…
The Munekata Sisters
Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to…
Wedding Ring
A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband’s illness.
Utamaro and His Five Women
Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models. A world of passion swirls around him, as the women in…
Yotsuya Ghost Story Part 2
Part 2 starts where the first film ended, with Iemon disposing of the bodies of his wife and Kohei, marrying upward, and being blackmailed by the evil Naosuke.
Yotsuya Ghost Story Part 1
Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely devoted to her husband.
Stepbrothers
1957 film directed by Miyoji Ieki. Winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
Mother
Lullaby of the Earth
The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world…
The Scent of Incense
After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply…
The Life of Oharu
Follows a woman’s fight and survival amid the vicissitudes of life and the cruelty of the society.
Equinox Flower
Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned…
Flowing
Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn’t see any future in her mothers trade in the late days…
Sansho the Bailiff
In medieval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
Ugetsu
In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage’s warning against seeking…
Ginza Cosmetics
Italy is usually cited as the anchor of the neo-realist movement in cinema, but Mikio Naruse’s Ginza Cosmetics (1951) is a reminder that Japan had its own output equally rooted…
Phoenix
A Japanese war widow recalls her love affair with her deceased husband.
The Three Treasures
The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor’s son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the Emperor’s vassal, prefers Ouso’s…