Hidekazu Nagae
Story of the weakest bank robber in history and a female lawyer who becomes a hostage.
Etsuko Kono is a 28-year-old woman who loves fashion. Aspiring to become a fashion editor, she joins a publishing company, but is sent to work in copy editing. There, her job is to correct errors and inadequate parts of documents and copies.
A year after the celebrated cracking of “The Glorious Team Batista” case, the talented medical staff at Tojo University Hospital once again finds itself embroiled in a web of intrigue and scandal.The scandal occurs this time in the ER when a mysterious letter arrives for Dr. Kimiko Taguichi (Yuko Takeuchi). The letter reads: “Chief Surgeon Hayami of the Emergency Center has a collusive relationship with a medical supplies maker. And the head nurse is in on it with him.” An unimaginable truth then awaits.
Korean-Japanese director Gu Su Yeon makes his directorial debut with the mouthwateringly delicious The Yakiniku Movie: Bulgogi. As the title clearly states, pride of place goes to juicy, bite-sized meat, and viewers will get a delightful eyeful of food, food, and more food in this fabulously fulfilling gourmet comedy. Reveling in Japan's love for food-themed shows, the film revolves around a culinary battle of David and Goliath proportions, cheekily parodying Japanese cooking shows with Iron Chef-like editing, excited running commentary, and comedic how-to segments. The Yakiniku Movie also shines a light on the food culture of Japan's resident Korean population, proving that tasty food transcends all boundaries.
Partially based on "The Gathering" in the Tomie manga. A young man with a past begins work in a factory, where he attracts the amorous attention of a mysterious woman who lurks behind the scenes. He is a relatively unique young man, perhaps a genetic one-off, in that he feels no particular attraction to Tomie. This of course intrigues Tomie, and she begins to become obsessed with him. Soon, he is caught in a vicious struggle between two rival Tomies. And neither Tomie will die.
The housewife and part-time private detective Noriko Yamada plays her old tricks again, uncovering mysterious corruption cases. But this time she will solve it adopting the style of "Beatrix Kiddo" from Kill Bill.
When he finds himself in an Hokkaido prison for a minor firearms possession offence, it doesn't take long for Hanawa (Tsutomu Yamazaki) to surrender utterly to the routine, arbitrary rules and grinding sameness of life in the prison system. Indeed, he comes to find his stint in solitary confinement, cut off from fellow-inmates and with a mechanical task of creating hundreds of folded paper bags each day, a curiously satisfying experience.
Keizoku is a Japanese mystery thriller created first as a TV drama and later as a film. It is about Detective Jun Shibata, who handles unsolved cases with her hardened partner Tōru Mayama. The television series was broadcast in eleven episodes between 8 January and 19 March 1999. A two-hour "special drama" was then broadcast on 24 December 1999. The series has been called "epoch-making" in the police procedural genre on Japanese television.
Kenichi is a half-Japanese, half-Chinese man of the underworld. You can sell him anything except children's organs. His domain is in Kabukicho, a gangland controlled by various Shanghai gangs intent on taking control. His former partner-in-crime, Fu-Chun, is rumored to have returned to Kabukicho, having fled years earlier after killing the number two of gangland boss, Yuan. Yuan wants to get even and attempts to do so by using Kenichi.
Ryoko Itakura returns as the government tax agent willing to tackle the toughest cases. This time she takes on a fanatical but lucrative religious cult run by a vile lecher.
A man is confined to a mental institution after trying to murder his fiancee. Two doctors relate his problem to an Asian philosophy that states that mental defects are transmitted from generation to generation. He learns that one of his distant ancestors murdered his wife as a way of demonstrating a point to his lord about the importance of love over the emptiness of lust and to drive home the point further, created a series of illustrations of the dead woman decaying which in turn trigger the memories of his distant descendant. But is the whole thing merely a game concocted by the two doctors, who may even have driven themselves mad?
At the beginning of the film the father-in-law of the protagonist dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. The remainder of the film is episodic, moving from one incident to another over the course of the three-day funeral, which is held (as is customary) in the home. These incidents contrast old ways and new ways, young and old, ritual ceremony and true feelings, often comically, but sometimes with real poignancy.
