Shigeru Yazaki

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.

7.1/10

Adaptation of the Arimasa Ohsawa novel Shinjuku Shark.

6.4/10

A grand old Japanese hotel is trying to get a prestigious contract as the site of a summit meeting of important foreign officials. Unfortunately, this hotel is quite popular with the Yakuza (Japanese gangsters) and is a favorite target of theirs for extortion. They employ a variety of schemes to con the hotel out of 'hush-money.' The hotel needs to rid itself of the Yakuza and finally begins to fight back by hiring Mahiru Inoue, a lawyer who is an expert at dealing with these criminals on their own terms. This film by Juzo Itami combines action with farce, as an all-out war ensues. Written by Tad Dibbern

7.2/10

The melodramatic story of a pink crew’s tragi-comedic adventures on location. A fictionalized adaptation of set photographer Ichiro Tsuda's 1980 book The Location (Za Rokēshon), an illustrated 229-page document about the cameraman’s experiences with pink cast and crew on the sets of several films produced in the late 1970's.

6.6/10

Deaths in Tokimeki tells the disturbing, compulsive story of a hit-man waiting to carry out a job: the assassination of the leader of a religious cult, masterminded by the leader's own deputy. But it is a story that is told in blocks, like the phrases in a child's computer game, and what counts most is not the narrative but the spaces between the blocks-the gaps that are filled with undefined menaces as potent as anything in Lovecraft.

7.4/10

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.

7/10

Two female friends and their very different lives… One witnesses the brutal rape of her sister while the other has to deal with a troubled relationship with an African-American soldier. Together, the girls will be drawn into a spiral of revenge and violence.

6.5/10