Keisuke Kinoshita
A new magistrate in the town of Horisoto—widely reputed to be the most lawless township in Japan, uses guile and his opponents' own misperceptions and prejudices to defeat his enemies and uproot corruption.
A lighthouse keeper and his family follow work from town to town, each time making new friends and receiving a visit from his troublesome father.
August 9, 1945. An atomic bomb drops on Urakami, Nagasaki at 11:02am. The story of Dr. Nagai and his family.
An extremely lovely tribute to Ozu, on the 20th anniversary of his death. It uses a combination of footage from vintage films and new material (both interviews and Ozu-related locations) shot by Ozu's long-time camera-man (who came out of retirement to work on this). Surprisingly (or perhaps not), it focuses less on Ozu's accomplishments as a film-maker than on his impact on the lives of the people he worked with..
A man whose son has been murdered pushes to create laws to financially protect victims' families.
A Japanese businessman is sent to Sri Lanka and meets a beautiful Japanese woman with a past. They befriend an old Japanese-Indian widow who has an estranged son in Japan.
By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them—the homeless father and son envisioning their dream house; the young woman abused by her uncle; the boy who imagines himself a trolley conductor—finds reasons to carry on. The unforgettable Dodes’ka-den was made at a tumultuous moment in Kurosawa’s life. And all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion are on fervent display in this, his gloriously shot first color film.
An inspirational teacher is the focus of this Japanese drama. After his friend kills himself, Natsuki takes a teaching job on an isolated island. His new students, the children of ignorant fishermen, can see no value in education; therefore, they have no desire to learn. Natsuki then introduces the children to volleyball. The kids are immediately fired up by the game. After winning the island tourney, they go on to win the national championship. Suddenly learning has taken on a whole new dimension. Meanwhile Natsuki gets married. Unfortunately for his wife, he refuses to leave the island.
Drama about the friendship between a lonely laborer (Atsumi) and a young woman (Hoshi) unable to enter college.
Former playmates (Naito and Tamura), both long ago abandoned by their parents, recall their youth and fall in love.
After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble.
A Tokyo family escaping the war relocates to a Hokkaido village; their daughter is set to marry the local leader's son, but her siblings disapprove.
A story about four best friends and their lives inside and outside college. Then suddenly one of them receives a surprising offer to be a movie star.
Hikaru and Ichiro are close friends in high school. Hikaru's elder brother Tadashi fell in love with Ichiro's elder sister, Mikako at first sight. Although she gave the cold shoulder to Tadashi, she gradually became fond of Tadashi.
A demobilized soldier becomes a day laborer with a road construction gang, and his wife goes to work to bolster their income. Their modest dream is to see their son grow and to be happy as a family.
The year is 1932, and a woman, whose tenant-farmer fiancé is fighting in China, is raped by the landowner's son, who has returned from the war with a crippling injury, and then forced into marriage with him. In four more chapters, presented over three decades, their children undertake their own searches for love, while the parents try to make each other as miserable as possible.
In a time of continuous civil wars ravaging the fields of feudal Japan, the eldest son of a very poor peasant family, living alongside the bridge over the Fuefuki river, decides to serve a warlord to escape his miserable condition, being soon followed by his younger brothers. Although not all the men of the family take this tragic path of death, women of the family will be doomed to endure the pain of loss during the next five generations.
When a wealthy, selfish family decides to take care of an elderly hobo who collapsed near their home, they are beset by visits from his numerous friends.
Five longtime friends get back together, but are disappointed to find that their bonds are not as strong as they once were.
After surviving the double suicide pact she made with her lover, a woman gives birth to their child.
A father curries favor with his bosses to further his career, but his wife has lost faith in him. She returns to her family home while they rent out their house during the summer to pay off their mortgage, and there she meets a lonely old man...
In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. Granny Orin is approaching 70, content to embrace her fate. Her widowed son Tatsuhei cannot bear losing his mother, even as she arranges his marriage to a widow his age. Her grandson Kesa, who's girlfriend is pregnant, is selfishly happy to see Orin die. Around them, a family of thieves are dealt with severely, and an old man, past 70, whose son has cast him out, scrounges for food. Will Orin's loving and accepting spirit teach and ennoble her family?
Two men at an ironworks encounter roadblocks: the first does not have the grades to get a job, while the other finds himself falling for a co-worker.
The plans of a trio of burglars are continually thwarted by the arrival of visitors to the house they plan to rob.
The story of the trials and tribulations of a lighthouse keeper and his wife.
A coming-of-age story portrayed as the loss of all youthful illusions. Sixteen-year-old Yoichi dreams of becoming a sailor. His parents are fishmongers, and Yoichi lives together with them and his four siblings in cramped living conditions. His beloved younger sister is given to a wealthy, childless uncle; his best friend moves away; the girl he fell in love with from afar is with someone else: little by little, Yoichi loses all the people that are important to him.
Ignoring the protests of his working-class mother, a young man becomes wrapped up in the world of delinquents and yakuza.
A young widow, made world weary by her abusive, neglectful husband, finds herself in a minor scandal when she's seen with her intense, no-nonsense childhood sweetheart.
Now an old man, Masao returns to his childhood home and begins to recall his upbringing in this abandoned sector of Japan.
Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world despite the fact that war is looming.
A student at a woman's university takes a controversial action against the school's old-fashioned doctrines.
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.
A young student falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to an invalid girl whom he can only see from afar.
A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.
Carmen falls in love with an artist in this sequel to Carmen Comes Home. The film is noted for being entirely shot with canted (Dutch) camera angles.
A girl who'd left her hometown for the exciting adventure of the big city returns home years later for a visit, soon somehow causing scandal.
A fishing union depends on two brothers to make up the losses caused by the dishonest captains they replaced.
A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband's illness.
Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely devoted to her husband.
A young woman from a wealthy family that has fallen on hard times seeks out the president of a car factory for a husband.
Part 2 starts where the first film ended, with Iemon disposing of the bodies of his wife and Kohei, marrying upward, and being blackmailed by the evil Naosuke.
When the future of his construction company falls into danger, a controlling father pushes his children into unsatisfying marriages and careers in order to regain financial stability.
The mistress of a crook real estate broker comes to terms with her soulless existence after an artist paints her portrait.
A Japanese family weathers much hardship after their military uncle comes to live with them during WWII.
A young man who is unable to tell his childhood friend how he feels makes a pledge with her to reveal all of their secrets during the upcoming festival.
The few residents left on the streets in Tokyo share their individual stories and come to understand the melancholy of saying goodbye.
The sweet but naive denizens of a charming port town are hoodwinked by a couple of con men at the outset of World War II. But the hustlers’ plan backfires when they come down with severe cases of conscience. Keisuke Kinoshita’s directorial debut is a breezy, warmhearted, and often very funny crowd-pleaser that’s a testament to the filmmaker’s faith in people.
A wealthy family will not allow the military to grow crops on their fields due to their superstitious beliefs about their son's illness.
This was 1942, so it was a national policy film, no matter what you call it. But when the war was still on the winning side, there wasn't even a little bit of sadness in the film (as the war was getting worse and worse, the burdens on our backs were increasing day by day, and we had to keep forming a line for tomorrow with nowhere to go (Akira Kurosawa's "The Most Beautiful", Admiral Nomura's "Enemy Air Raid", etc.) (Song of Annihilation, directed by Sasaki Yasushi). The film closes with the hope of the blue cloud that is bubbling up in the air. Or it may be the last time that a Japanese film talks about war and looks at the end of the war with an unconcerned eye.
A businessman runs afoul of the law and commits suicide, leaving behind a wife and five children. The eldest son takes the family to Tokyo and labors to restore its name and fortune
Pre-war Asakusa was a riotous district of cabarets, dance-halls and brothels - a striking backdrop for Shimazu's story of innocence and experience. Pretty, young Reiko is the new dancer in an infamous theatre troupe, and her fellow performers try to protect her virtue in a land of vice. Meanwhile, an ageing actor wants to be a hero off stage as well as on, and the troupe matriarch Marie has to keep them all together.
