Moving

A salaryman faces a major life change as his firm undergoes financial difficulties. To add to his troubles, a man claiming to be his long-estranged father shows up at his house requesting shelter. One of the best of Somai's seriocomic studies of the messiness of family life.

In Somai's final film, an alcoholic civil servant wakes up under a cherry tree in Tokyo next to a bar hostess with whom he's impulsively made a suicide pact. Though he's now changed his mind, he agrees to travel with her to Hokkaido, her preferred site for ending it all. An elegiac road movie of restrained emotion.

This dazzling portrait of an orphaned girl at several stages of her life, from childhood to adulthood, opens with one of the most famous long takes in Japanese cinema, a single shot spanning months of time and disparate locations.

A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.

After witnessing the rape of his wife, a man's mind snaps and he attacks a prostitute. Two years later, the man and the prostitute meet by chance.

The movie takes place in the five-day period before, during and after a ferocious, seemingly liberating typhoon, which five of the students endure while marooned in their school gymnasium.

A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.

A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.

A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.

Three high-school students tangle with indulgent yakuza and lackadaisical police as they set out in search of the class bully, who has been kidnapped.