Isuzu Yamada

A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town. (imdb)

A ruthlessly ambitious lord, egged on by his wife, works to fulfill a prophesy that he would become Emperor. (imdb)

In a slum flophouse, a collection of beggars and thieves bewail their lot in life, and Osugi, the landlady, fights with her sister, Okayo, over the man they both desire, the thief Sutekichi (imdb)

Ayako becomes the mistress of her boss, Mr. Asai, so she can pay her father's debt, and prevent him from going to prison for embezzlement. She also sends money to her brother Hiroshi to pay his university tuition, but her father intercepts it. She tricks Mr. Fujino into giving her money so that she can marry her boyfriend Nishimura, but Fujino calls in the police. (imdb)

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 of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers. (imdb)

Two sisters live with their father. The younger sister is embroiled in an affair and becomes pregnant. The elder sister has run away from her husband and returned with her child to her parent's home. Both sisters are astonished when their mother, long thought dead, turns up alive. The sisters are even more stunned when they learn what their mother's life has been. (imdb)

Umekichi, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, feels obliged to help her lover Furusawa when he asks to stay with her after becoming bankrupt and leaving his wife. However her younger sister Omocha tells her she is wasting her time and money on a loser. She thinks that they should both find wealthy patrons to support them. Omocha therefore tries various schemes to get rid of Furusawa, and set themselves up with better patrons. (imdb)

The story is set around an American Air Force base which has attracted bars and brothels and the native Japanese who need this sordid world to scape by and make money to just barely survive. A love triangle develops among the dwellers of a falling down apartment building and a local gangster called Killer Joe. (imdb)

A 1960s co-production between Japanese directors Yuzo Kawashima and Mikio Naruse

In Tokyo, Osen is the servant girl of an unscrupulous antiques dealer, Kumazawa, who takes in the penniless Sokichi Hata. Kumazawa mistreats Sokichi and Osen, while swindling some Buddhist monks out of their temple treasures. When Kumazawa is arrested, Osen agrees to help Sokichi finance his dream of going to medical school. They live in a humble room, and eventually the only way Osen can find enough money for them is to prostitute herself during the day, without Sokichi knowing. (imdb)

A self-absorbed young actor humiliates an elderly Noh performer, who then commits suicide. His act of cruelty compels his father to disown him, leading the once promising actor to a life on the streets. But his desire to win back the respect of his father and the affection of the dead actor's daughter pushes him toward a more noble existence. Naruse employed a delicately structured mise-en-scene in this family melodrama, which evokes the work of Josef von Sternberg.

Kiyone Sakurai, an apprentice swordmaker makes a sword for his guardian, Kozaemon Onoda. Onoda breaks the sword while defending his lord which eventually leads to his death at the hands of Naito, when Naito demands to marry his daughter Sasae. Sasae vows to avenge her father's death and pleads for Kiyone Sakurai to make a special sword for her. So Kiyone and his fellow swordmaker Kiyotsugu go to the master swordsmith Kiyohide Yamatomori to learn their craft and forge the sword. (imdb)

It is based on Kawaguchi Matsutaro's adaptation of Maupassant's "Boule de Suif". To this story Mizoguchi added some of his own elements. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, it is the story of a group of people who try to flee the battleground in a horsedrawn carriage. The bourgeois use the expression "lump of fat" to refer sarcastically to the prostitute who is riding along with them. When they are caught by the enemy, they offer to send her to the commander as a human sacrifice... (rapidshareindex.com)

As the titular, exceedingly popular performing duo (respectively a samisen player and a Shinnai singer) they enact a tragicomic tale of unrequited love that--save for a deeply affecting, pathos-ridden final scene--is far removed from director Mikio Naruse's usual cinema obsessions. (slantmagazine)

Set in the Osaka theater world, the story is dominated by a self-righteous troupe leader (Roppa Furukawa) who bravely risks his popularity by selecting only plays that support the Japanese military cause, and who decides to break up the love affair between his star actor (Kazuo Hasegawa) and a shamisen player (Isuzu Yamada) in order to purify the actor's commitment to his craft. (Dan Sallitt)

When roving bands of bandits attempt to overrun the new capital city of Edo, a Samurai puts his life on the line to defend the city and its people.

Zushio and his sister Anju are kidnapped and sold to a cruel slave-master. Will they ever be reunited with their mother again?

A group of seemingly ordinary merchants is really a band of assassins for hire. When they discover that all the assassins in Edo are being killed they must act quickly to find the culprit. (imdb)

The first film where Kobayashi served as both director and writer, Mittsu no ai follows the lives of six people in a quiet village in the Japanese highlands...

This is essentially the story of Qin from the founding of "China" by his unifying the various provinces, through the building of the great wall on to close to his death.

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 conflicting dreams of the members of a Japanese family are threatened by a continuing series of misfortunes. (imdb)

Shozo is plagued by the needs of his ex-wife and his current one, but prefers the company of his cat. (Hulu+)

During the raging war between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans, the swordsman Mohei (whose family has been completely decimated) is recruited by Toyotomi to overcome the seat of power, Osaka Castle. Mohei's daredevil skills will be put to severe tests. (The Movie Database)

A voice over recites the history of the atom bomb attack. Fade to a classroom, a few years after that fateful day. Kitagawa sensei [Eiji Okada] hovers at the front of a classroom filled with very serious students listening to the radio. Cut to young Michiko (Reiko Matsuyama) breaking down and imploring Kitagawa to turn it off. She covers her ears. By the time he comes to comfort her. There are drops of blood on her textbook. She's suffering from radiation sickness. (jfilmpowwow.blogspot.com)

The Kamiya family struggles to keep the town fishing association from going bankrupt as they deal with a dishonest captain and his degenerate crew. (imdb)

Chutaro of Banba is a lone yakuza searching for the mother who abandoned him when he was five. During his travels, he is pursued by the henchmen of a yakuza boss whom he'd attacked. (imdb)

His mother abandoned him as a child, so he had no choice but to live outside society. Even so, he grows up determined to reunite with her. Worried that she might be living in misery, he saves his money to help, only to find that she has married into wealth and social position and has no intention of seeing her outcast Yakuza son... (imdb)

Shusei Tokuda's starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a sex worker/entertainer forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo's wife) born into a dirt poor family is sold to a brothel when her father falls ill as she is the only item of worth the family has. Follows her progress from brothel to brothel & personal change as she is blown about by circumstance, all the time trying to earn enough to keep her family together (imdb)

WWII is at an end. Baby boomers are in full bloom. Minister Araki is introducing a healthcare bill that aims to establish "Birth Control Consultation Centers" across Japan. As his speech echoes in the national assembly, his wife receives a different message from the doctor: She is pregnant. (mubi)

The murder mystery solving Young Lord has moved on from helping out with minor crimes and infractions, taking up a new hobby of archery which may wind up putting his life at stake when he runs afoul of the shogun's chief attendant, a man so vile that Young Lord decides to take him on and find out who is really pulling the strings from behind the scenes as a family is brutally murdered in their own home...

In the midst of the depression, two ronin rack their brains to come up with a dishonest scheme. Taking a man from the countryside, they fashion him into Ise Isenokami, the finest swordsman under the sun. Pretending to be his followers, they visit the various sword-fighting dojo. Out of fear upon hearing the name Isenokami, they pay him off and do not let him enter their training halls.

A bizarre murder at a hot springs resort threatens to disrupt an Edo detective’s (Hasegawa) vacation. When his hot-blooded wife (Yamada) starts snooping around, however, he finds himself reluctantly drawn into the case.

The lord of Aizu Shirakawa-han was a descendant of Tokugawa, therefore the people in Aizu were strongly loyal to Tokugawa. Even the farmers were proud of it. The tragedy was, the last shogun of Tokugawa himself agreed to Taisei-hokan, the restoration of imperial rule, nevertheless, the Aizu army refused to surrender.

There’s no place like home: even with four children,the Uemura family is able to live a modest but happy life in their cramped, rented flat. The parents support the two elder daughters’ artistic ambitions to the best of their ability, using all the means at their disposal to make it possible for Tomoko to paint and Nobuko to sing in a choir. (KG)

Kenji Mizoguchi is credited as “supervisor” on this rare Japanese genre film, which stars the stunning Isuzu Yamada (Osaka Elegy, Throne of Blood) as a professional criminal, part con woman and part martial artist, who falls in love with a young man from the straight world.

During the ultra-violent era of the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, one man rose above the rest with his ideas of how to overthrow the corrupt government and end the bloodshed between the Choshu and Satsuma clans which would ultimately lead to the alliance of these 2 clans, and restoration of the emperor to full power. Based on the play that made Sawada Shojiro famous, this is the story of Tsukigata Hanpeita, a forward-looking samurai from Choshu, who along with ...