Isao Kimura

A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.

An executive mortgages all he owns to stage a coup and gain control of the National Shoe Company, with the intent of keeping the company out of the hands of incompetent and greedy executives. (imdb)

Murakami, a young homicide detective, has his pocket picked on a bus and loses his pistol. Frantic and ashamed... (imdb)

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theater to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family to be with her, while trying to keep his Art Theatre solvent. (imdb)

The film is about a young Terayama who appears in whiteface along with his mother. The young Terayama deals with his sexual hang-ups due to the onset of puberty. He also slowly drifts away from his clinging mother. (imdb)

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns out to be married and won't leave his wife. Her older brother tries to marry off his children and hang on to/ extend his farm through an advantageous marriage in the face of threatened land confiscation and the desire of his children to get comfortable urban jobs instead of the backbreaking work in the paddy fields under parental control. (imdb)

A young woman is driven by bitterness and frustration to the promiscuity of her mother against which she had rebelled.

The film revolves around the character of Hachiro Kiyokawa, a farmer turned master swordsman and scholar. We first meet him after his arrest for the killing of a detective working for the Shoganate. As a supporter of the Emperor and a conspirator plotting to destroy the Shogunate and kill all foreigners, he is most wanted by the Shoganate forces who are interested in gaining power thru foreign technology. (imdb)

Yuriko, owner of a barbershop in Sapporo, takes a trip with Sugino, her lover. When they enjoy themselves in the cold and the snow, Yuriko tells him that she has come with the intention to break up with him. Convinced that there is another man, eaten up by jealousy, Sugino decides to kill her at the lake Shikotsuko. But Yuriko tells him that she's pregnant...

The heroine, Ritsuko, is married to Shingo, a design engineer. Shingo is unable to father a child so Ritsuko is artificially inseminated. The birth of a son, Takashi, however, does not help marital relations between husband and wife. When Sakaguchi, a doctor having marital problems with his wife, Shina, is revealed as the sperm donor, Ritsuko develops a passion for the doctor.

A cunning female jewel thief named Black Lizard who tries to kidnap Sanaye, a wealthy jeweler's beautiful daughter as part of a plot to steal the jeweler's expensive "Star of Egypt" diamond. To thwart the planned kidnapping, the jeweler hires Japan's number one detective, the brilliant Akechi. (imdb)

In Ryokichi Urshiyama (Isao Kimura), a struggling writer who, over the course of the film, sinks into a vicious cycle of despair and drunkenness, Naruse creates a vividly unsympathetic on-screen surrogate. (Slant)

Bushido, a.k.a. "The Way of the Warrior" is the chivalrous code of the samurai that has influenced the Japanese way-of-life for centuries. This epic film spans several generations of a typical samurai family, and illustrates the intricate system of loyalty, honor and sacrifice which bound the samurai in ages past, and which, in many ways, persists to this very day. (amazon)

Sudo and Mori are two university students who make money by picking up rich girls in dance clubs and conning them into giving them cash. Mori is the brains of the operation, and Sudo is the suave dancer who picks up the girls. Over the course of the film, Sudo becomes involved with three different girls and is drawn into the gangster milieu, which he seems unable to resist even though he is responsible for his mother, grandmother, and sister, Masako. (Catherine Russell)

A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness. (imdb)

With his friend Matahachi, Takezo has joined an army on its way to battle. After their side loses, they seek shelter in the isolated home of a widow, Oko, and her daughter, Akemi. Oko seduces Matahachi, who forgets his betrothal to the virtuous Otsu. Takezo returns to the village. Matahachi's family rejects Takezo's report and has him arrested for treason. A monk rescues him from death and sentences him to the study of the samurai code..(IMDB) (imdb)

A romantic drama depicting the lives of two generations of a family who run a florist shop in Tokyo. (KG)

Very fast-moving sketches of a corrupt politician, a jaded geisha, an impoverished family with 18 children and a boarder who works as a day-laborer and manufactures atomic bombs at night. (Audie Bock)

The film centers on the working class families struggling to survive with menial labor in a rapidly modernizing city. Keiko and Saeko Hibino (Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho) are sisters who support their parents by working at a local factory. The sisters must bear the burden of their traditional father (Eijiro Tono), who is pressuring Keiko to marry to save the family business, and compete with the modern city girls who get by on their looks to get ahead. (ADC)

A teacher at a continuation school who is not getting ahead in the world goes to the Ginza and is hit by a car. A student he asks to help him demands money, and the girl he loves snubs him. (Audie Bock)

In the second film in the series Takezo embarks on a quest after three years of solitary contemplation.

The movie opens with Musashi visiting the Yagyu clan to seek instruction from the Great Lord Sekishusai, a renowned master strategist and swordsman. It turns out that Sekishusai is mighty difficult to get an audience with, denying all requests for matches. By one of the many astounding coincidences to be found in the Eiji Yoshikawa tale, Otsu has ended up working as Sekishusai's personal assistant. (lardbiscuit.com)

Musashi has defeated and shamed the leader of the Yoshioka fencing school, and now their only chance and redeeming their tattered reputation is to kill Musashi. So they move heaven and earth to take revenge. As the vendetta mounts, Musashi takes up residence with a kind merchant named Honami. Seijuro's brother Denshichiro challenges Musashi to a duel on an evening when Musashi has already agreed (reluctantly) to accompany Honami on a visit to the local pleasure quarters. (lardbiscuit.com)

Early on we find Musashi in a private moment with Otsu by riverside. In contrast with his tender emotions before the big fight, he now tells Otsu she cannot find happiness with a man who's done all the killing he's done. They embrace, then he pulls away and leaves her, apologizing for what he's done. (...) Wandering alone, Musashi comes across a boy named Iori whose father has just died, leaving him an orphan. (...) Musashi decides to stay and help Iori with his farming for a while (...) (lardbiscuit.com)

Satoko is a mistress by trade, or fate: when her master, the silkscreen artist of the Kohoan Temple in Kyoto, dies, she is given to the temple's lascivious head priest Kikuchi. She is drawn to a melancholy young acolyte, Jinen, who has observed the profligacy of his cruel master and Satoko's utter dependence on the man...The story unfolds in a dreamlike manner, a flashback inspired by a now-infamous image on a silkscreen in the souvenir shop at the so-called Temple of the Wild Geese. (KG)

Shimamura, an artist, comes to this snowbound town to rejuvenate himself. He connects with Komako, a geisha he met on a previous trip, and it seems like love. She's the foster daughter of a local family, almost engaged to the family's son Yukio, now dying of consumption. He's tended by his sister Yuko who's angry at Komako for abandoning her brother. Shimamura returns to Tokyo but promises he will be back soon... (KG)

A very lower class laborer and his family endure a complex struggle in post World War II Japan.

A headstrong young man seeks to join the Shinsengumi, but while his determination impresses his superiors, questions begin to arise as to his true identity and intentions.

A wealthy Japanese sugar factory manager in Hawaii finds his wife sinking into depression and madness.

A violent thug forces his young girlfriend into prostitution.