Shinobu Muraki
The patriarch of a bickering family announces his retirement, stirring competition about who will succeed him as a leading practitioner of Noh theater, his granddaughter or grandson.
Karin has lived alone in a secluded mountain village with her consumptive mother since her father died. Her worried grandfather advises her to send her mother to a sanatorium and be adopted by him, although she refuses to accept. On the Buddhist All Soul’s Day Festival in August, a messenger from her grandfather pays a sudden visit to her house.
Two poor, married farmers have recently lost their only child; after a freak visitation, they pry open an alien cocoon to greet their new daughter.
In 1985, Chris Marker traveled to Japan to attend the filming of “Ran,” directed by Akira Kurosawa. Marker analyzes the progress of filming; the infinite patience of a team under the orders of a meticulous director down to the smallest detail; the antithetical mixture of the modern with the traditional; of the real with the fictitious; of life with cinema… and literature.
With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
A police procedural surrounding murder at a bookstore and the private lives of the cops trying to solve the case.
Kôsuke Kindaichi, a somewhat peculiar private detective, visits a remote town. He meets a police detective and they start to investigate an old unsolved murder. Then some murders happen. Kindaichi must find out about the past in order to reveal who the murderer is.
A scruffy detective investigates the murders of three sisters on a small Japanese island in 1946.
A beautifully told story of a woman hardened by marriage to a man she doesn't love, after giving herself to another. She dedicates herself to her work, designing and creating plaited cords for kimono.
A gunslinger is hired to kill a news photographer. The young ward of the shot photographer discovers the set-up behind the killing - that a laboratory is being set up by a Nazi organization to capture and train talented youth and that the photographer was about to expose it.
Ex-jazz pianist turned promoter finds he is successful, but empty. When an entrepreneur sends him to Moscow with a jazz combo, he falls in with the dissident youth of the city, and again finds life empty.
Suspense drama about an assassin charged with breaking up a gold smuggling ring, and the contract subsequently purchased against him and his employer.
A man with a dark past comes from Tokyo to the fishing port of Izu, and tries to begin a new life as a fisherman.
An early Okamoto yakuza film, though it's not in the Underworld series (along with The Last Gunfight and The Big Boss) despite being alternatively known as "Death of the Boss." While Okamoto did not write this film and took on the project because he was assigned and "just doing [his] job" according to an interview with Chris Desjardins in Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, he did express a general excitement about working in action cinema (which shows through in this film's energy.) I have no plot to share, unfortunately, so I'll just add a few more screencaps than usual to make up for it.
Suspense drama about a married salaryman (Kobayashi) whose affair with one of his co-workers (Hara) is compromised when, returning from a clandestine meeting with his lover, he runs into a neighbor who is later accused of murder. Questioned by police about the neighbor, and blackmailed by his lover's neighbor, the salaryman's lies lead him on a path to destruction.
Aiko, a bar hostess, falls for the son of a company president who also keeps a mistress, and whose family disapproves of his relationship with the bar hostess.
Comedy about a 50-something movie director, his new bride, a classical dancer, and his adult son and daughter and their loves.
