Ittoku Kishibe

Director Takeshi Kitano takes on Japanese cinematic legend Zatoichi. Kitano stars as the blind wanderer with a distinctive red cane and a shock of platinum blonde hair. Softly-spoken, he makes a living as a masseur and by gambling, but his humble, shuffling facade masks a lightning-fast, deadly swordsman. (Miramax)

A comic, violent, tragically hip first feature that brings a fresh new look to a classic genre, the couple-on-the-run. Derived from a manga, the bizarre collection of characters in this gangster story have been brought to life in an eruption of vivid color, surf punk music, flashy designer wear, outlandish campyness and one long, fast paced chase. (Two Boots Pioneer Theater)

A psychic housewife and her husband become burdened with a kidnapped girl who escaped her assailant... (imdb)

Detective Azuma is a Dirty-Harry style rogue cop who often uses violence and unethical methods to get results... (imdb)

The story of a woman's life work founding a bone marrow bank for her son. (CD Japan)

Hiroshi is a medical student plagued with amnesia after a road accident that took the life of his girlfriend Ryoko. Settling back into his parents' concrete apartment with his mind a blank sheet, he sleepwalks through the days like a ghost. (Midnight Eye)

Killing her sister is just what a dreary Japanese seamstress needed to perk up her life... (offoffoff.com)

Machi, a high school student unsure of where her life is heading starts making up stories with her two friends. Soon they all agree to work on one tale together each picking up where the last one left off. (Twitchfilm)

Junior high student Harada Takumi is a pitching prodigy, but his attitude and arrogance alienates him from schoolmates and even his own family..Takumi finally finds a friend..in classmate Nagakura Go, a catcher who greatly admires Takumi's pitching. Together they form a "battery" and join the school baseball team, but [they] have a falling out after a loss, bringing the team to a standstill. At this time, Takumi's brother becomes..ill, and his only hope is for Takumi to win the big game for him. (crunchyroll)

Middle-aged Minako is a milk woman in Nagasaki, living and uncomplicated and unhurried life delivering milk daily around the city. In their youth she and Keita were in love, but separated after his father and her mother died together causing a scandal. She never married, but Keita did and is now a city official with a terminally ill wife, Yoko. Before she dies Yoko tries to reunite the former lovers, but this disturbs and angers Minako. (ftvdb.bfi.org.uk)

Edogawa Rampo is a writer whose latest work is censored by the government, deemed too disturbing and injurious to the public to be allowed to be published. However, after burning his drafts, his publisher shows him a newspaper with an account of events just like his forbidden story. As the film progresses, fantasy and reality intermingle in a tale that draws heavily on influences from Poe and Stoker's Dracula. (imdb)

Two-bit gangster Goro Noda (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is living a hand-to-mouth life with his close friends. One day, he gets into a great deal of trouble and a government organization slaughters his friends and Goro decides to seek revenge against the organization. (sensasian.com)

A high school girl discovers that she suddenly has the ability to travel in time. (imdb)

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 of the wealthy Makioka family from Osaka, and draws a parallel between their activities and the seasonal variations in Japan. (imdb)

Fuyukichi is a former university professor who gets fired from the museum he is working for, because he is affected by the Alzheimer disease. First he stay with his wife but when she has to go to the hospital herself, Fuyukichi is sent to his son's place in Osaka, his son has couple problems, but his wife is committed at taking care of his father...

The film tells the story of a writer with a wandering eye and his jealous wife. (Wikipedia)

A strange murder mystery tale about a lady who asks a forgery artist (Hiroyuki Sanada) to forge a series of rare bondage / torture paintings for her. Upon discovering that the client was actually the original model in those paintings, he murders her. (foolamak.com)

Swordsman Kanemi Sanzaemon stabs and kills the Lady Renko , mistress to the Lord Tabu Ukyou. This crime is normally punishable by beheading, yet Sanzaemon is spared. Instead, he is imprisoned in isolation for a year, during which time we learn of the corruption of Renko, and the growing rift that is forming between the Lord and his cousin Hayatonosho Obiya. When Sanzaemon is released and promoted to chief attendant, things really start to get complicated. (japanesefilmfestival.blogspot.com)

A poetic story about a man rendered comatose by an accident and a bar maid, where the months pass, the seasons come and go, and the man sleeps on... (movies.yahoo.com)

A great variety of aviation professionals such as pilots, flight attendants, the ground crew, mechanics, dispatchers, controllers, and the bird patrol crew all support a single flight. They have only one mission: to secure the safety of the passengers! Today was supposed to be any other day on the job, departing on schedule and heading safely to Honolulu, but... (imdb)

Komaki is a thirty-something woman that has had it with her perpetually unemployed aspiring writer husband. Following the divorce, she moves back to her Tokyo-area hometown of Kyojima along with her young daughter, Non-chan. However, she has a difficult time making ends meet in big city Tokyo. Her solution? Take a chance and try opening her very own bento (lunch box) shop. (Dr. Jay Trotter)

Tetsuya Nakajima directs this black comedy about Sunday, that day of rest. Constructed like Grand Hotel, the film interweaves the lives of an assorted collection of oddball Tokyoites living in the same apartment building. (KG)

The environment and the movie stars at a Japanese film studio in the early '30s are recreated in this drama. Director Ogata (Ittoku Kishibe) discovers a new female star quite by accident. Koharu Tanaka (Narimi Arimori) works selling candy at a studio theater when she is given a part as a bit player. After the studio's top leading lady is embroiled in a scandal, Koharu is suddenly thrust into the limelight when she replaces her in a film and gains instant fame and fortune. (answers.com)

Film parodies a family putting their 6-year old through rigorous exams and IQ tests to enter a better than average elementary school. It also looks at the midlife crisis of the husband and touches on role reversal in the family as the father becomes the homemaker and the mother goes out selling tombstones.

A wealthy matriarch is kidnapped by a gang of three. She is insulted by the amount of money they propose to demand as ransom, and a strange interchange of roles takes place between captors ... (imdb)

Zen is the town crank, local kabuki star and proprietor of a venison restaurant in a rural mountain village. When his wife & best friend return to town after having eloped together years earlier, the ties between kabuki and real life are made evident.

In the fictional Tokyo suburb of Mahoro, Keisuke Tada works as a "benriya" - a general problem solver for hire. One day in January, former classmate Haruhiko Gyoten appears unannounced. Back in their schooldays Haruhiko was a quiet person who rarely talked but now he is talkative. Both men are over 30 years old and divorced. Haruhiko suddenly asks to spend the night at Keisuke's home. He turns down Haruhiko, but Haruhiko is persistant and finally Keisuke allows him to sleep over for one night. (Asian Wiki)

A young actor is arrested for a brutal double murder. He confesses but pretty soon the possibility of him being mentally ill and therefore legally incompetent comes to the fore. A young female psychiatrist working on the case becomes convinced that he is faking his apparent schizophrenia.

A samurai treks across the American West in pursuit of a gang of robbers.

An elderly couple is offered to meet with their dead son by strange people in exchange for herbal medicine. (imdb)

A former TV presenter is murdered. On the same day, two police officers from the Metropolitan police Special Mission Task Force, Sugishita Ukyo (Yutaka Mizutani) and Kameyama Kaoru (Yasufumi Terawaki), are guarding a female Diet member, Katayama Hinako (Yoshino Kimura). The pair identifies explosives and saves her life. From the clues left at the scene, Sugishita builds up his case and finds a connection between the murder of the TV presenter and the attempted murder of the Diet member. (asianwiki)

A young man, Kazuo, joins a new cult religion even though he sees through the initial recruitment pretense, and participating in the activities of a new social phenomenon, some of whose members genuinely believe in the principles and practice as preached, while others have more Machiavellian motives. (imdb)

Kojiro Himuro is a champion figure skater taking part in an upcoming world competition. Yet, he is suffering from a complicated CTEPH (chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension). Kantaro Kurosu is the director of the Cross Medical Center. He asks Michiko Daimon to perform surgery on Kojiro, but, right before his surgery some thing happened. (imdb)

Tokyo is suddendly covered by a dome shaped electromagantic cloud for an unknown reason and is totally blocked and isolated from other parts of the world. The temperature inside the cloud is slowly increasing. The Soviet Pacific fleet is getting closer. The U.S. is forcing Japan to form a new government. Scientists and research workers outside Tokyo have to race against time to find out how to get through the cloud in order to rescue the 12,000,000+ lives in Tokyo and the fate of the country.

In August 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the area around Sakhalin Island. Ezure Tetsu escaped with her two sons from Sakhalin Island and arrived in Abashiri City, Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan. What awaited them was extremely cold weather and famine. They worked very hard. In 1971, Tetsu's second son Shujiro returns to Japan after finding success in the United States. He visits Abashiri for the first time in 15 years. His mother Tetsu lives alone there. (imdb)

Koichi is a son in the Suzuki family. He is a hikikomori ("recluse") and dies suddenly. The rest of Suzuki family, father Yukio, mother Yuko and daughter Fumi, fall into confusion. Especially the mother Yuko, who is shocked by her son's death, and loses her memory. Fumi lies to her mother and tells her "Koichi stopped being a hikikomori and now works in Argentina." (imdb)

A James Brown fanatic gangster decided to disband his own gang and see his long lost daughter before entering prison. Hoping to change his mind, his underlings planned to kidnap James Brown to convince him to perform privately for their boss.

Former childhood friends Kadoya Kaneo and Tochino Masatatsu cross paths again. Kaneo is now a yakuza member, while Masatatsu is a nightclub owner with a distaste for crime gangs. When a yakuza boss dies, a struggle for his position takes place between Kaneo's boss Awano and the young Nakahira. Nakahira's men try to extort money from Masatatsu, bringing him in between a yakuza battle.

An emotionless hitman is sent on a mission to a remote town. There he stays with a caretaker/driver/servant/doctor who is given minimal instruction over the phone by "the organization." A prostitute joins them. Death is inevitable, but whose?

A big secret is intertwined with 5 murders that occur at different times & locations. Firstly a shooting at an apartment. When senior officer Kizaki (Takahashi Issei), rushes over upon hearing gunshots, his senior Omura (Murakami Jun) is already there. Suspects are narrowed down through legwork & forensics, but Kizaki feels that there is more. Before long, a girl (Kaho) with some sort of connection to the case emerges. This is only ep1, from there it gets ever more complicated (DramaWiki & me)

A heartwarming, based-on-true story of how a hearing-impaired couple, Masahiro and Namiko, knew each other, got married, and began participating in the Triathlon. The story is told in flashbacks as Namiko awaits childbirth.

Yet another Japanese sex comedy.

Lord Oda Nobunaga plans to control Japan where rival warlords battle by waging war against several clans. His vassal Araki Murashige stages a rebellion and promptly disappears (imdb)

Daimon Michiko is a freelance surgeon who wanders from hospital to hospital because the harsh environment led many doctors to retire. However, Michiko doesn't look like a doctor at all with her flashy clothes and eccentric attitude. (imdb)