Masaru Nakamura
A young boxer and a call girl get caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme over the course of one night in Tokyo.
Several hundred years after the Battle of Dannoura, the Genji and Heike clans face off again in a poor mountain town with a buried treasure legend. A revolver-wielding stranger, a lone gunman, burdened with emotional scars and blessed with incredible skill, drifts into town and crosses paths with two warring clans who are both on the hunt for a hidden treasure in a remote western town. Knowing his services are valuable to either side, he offers himself to the clan who will offer up the largest share of the wealth. Yoshitsune commands his Genji gang in white while Kiyomori leads his Heike gang in red. Expectations collide as the key players wonder which gang the gunman will join. Dirty tricks, betrayal, desire and finally, love, get jumbled together, as the situation erupts into a showdown.
The hero, Hyakkimaru is a wandering "demon hunter" whose extra body parts -- 48 to be exact -- were grafted onto his head and trunk by a herb doctor who discovered him as an infant, in a process that echoes "Frankenstein" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau." His warlord father gave the originals to 48 demons in exchange for power. When Hyakkimaru kills a demon, he wins back a body part. He is spotted in one of these battles, with a giant spider demon, by Dororo, a scrappy female thief who is fascinated by not only Hyakkimaru's prowess with the sword blade poking out of his arm but the new leg he grows after dicing his opponent. Is he a man -- or a monster? After hearing his story from an old minstrel, she decides to join him on his travels and find out for herself.
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
Two contract killers cross paths in the middle of the same job and realize they are childhood friends. Together they take a break from killing and visit the small island they once called home. After reflecting on their past lives they decided to team up and use their talents in killing for good... much to the upset of the crime syndicates.
Nostalgia is Takashi Miike’s favorite film of his considerable body of work. Including biographical elements, Nostalgia centers around the home and school of a young boy, whose family mix the violent and dysfunctional with the comic and the loveable. Though containing elements of the sudden and shocking brutality that many associate with this director, Young Thugs – Nostalgia is more concerned with a child’s moment of leaving the internalized world of fantasy, and passing on eagerly to the next stage of life. A wonderful, touching, startling vision that is uniquely Miike’s.
Wada (Masahiro Motoki), a salary man, is enlisted to venture off to China to investigate a potential Jade mine. After his arrival, Wada encounters a violent, yet sentimental, yakuza (Renji Ishibashi), who takes the liberty of joining his adventure through China. Led on their long and disastrous journey to the mine by Shen, the three men come across something even more magical and enticing...
A large, dinosaur-like monster has risen from Tokyo Bay and attacked the city. As the government collapses into chaos, the people of a rural town in Fukui Prefecture, from whose perspective we see the entire movie, watch as the events unfold on TV. Some decide to run for their lives, some take it as a sign of the apocalypse, some go completely crazy, but most of the townspeople wait and watch, and wonder where the monster will head next.
A Takashi Miike film that is, to a degree, autobiographical-- Young Thugs: Innocent Blood follows three friends through their first year after leaving high school. Having robbed their teacher on their last day, Ryoko gets a job in a hair salon, while the two boys settle down into a career of enforcement and protection.
Dangerous street fighter Kazuyoshi Tamai finds out that his rival, Takeshi, is the leader of a gang responsible for a series of assaults. Kazuyoshi is ready to face off against Takeshi, but comic challenges keep his nemesis out of reach. It's not until years later -- when Kazuyoshi becomes a championship boxer and Takeshi is a pro wrestler -- that they meet again in a battle that pits two combatants with very different fighting styles.
