Japan

Tokyo, 1934. Gang boss Arakawa is too ill and a successor must be named. The choice falls on Nakai, but being an outsider he refuses and suggests senior clansman Matsuda instead. But Matsuda is in jail and the elders won’t wait for his release, so they appoint the younger and more malleable Ishido to take the reins. Clan honour and loyalties are severely tested when Matsuda is released, resulting in an increasingly violent internal strife. An atmospheric tale of gangland intrigue written by Kazuo Kasahara (Battles Without Honour and Humanity) and starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, (Lone Wolf and Cub, The Bounty Hunter Trilogy) and genre legend Koji Tsuruta, Big Time Gambling Boss is one of the all-time classics of the yakuza genre. Paul Schrader called it the richest and most complex film of its type, while novelist Yukio Mishima hailed it as a masterpiece.Read More »

Saki, Anju, Chiaki, Ami, and Kaya reunite for the first time in years. The five of them excitedly decide to go Toshimaen Amusement Park, a place that was very important to them when they were younger. None of them know that they’re about to enter a nightmare… (from themoviedb.org)Read More »

When regular police procedure fails, an ex-police captain recruits a group of deadly assassins to take down a corrupt Yakuza boss. Their first assignment is to intercept a briefcase belonging to a Latin American gang that is smuggling drugs into Japan. Led by Ryuichi Koga (Sonny Chiba), the last descendant of the Koga Ninja clan, they will leave a trail of bodies along their way through Japan’s underworld.Read More »

When a priceless jewel owned by rich heiress Sabine is stolen, along with her daughter, professional thief and hired killer Ryuichi Koga and his gang are hired to retrieve both. At a ransom exchange, the team gets the girl back but lose the money and the jewel. When Sabine decides to deal directly with the thieves and obtains the jewel on her own by paying the ransom, Koga, having been stiffed of his fee by Sabine, steals the jewel. Little does he know, it’s a fake. Now, Koga and the team must break into a high security bank to steal the real jewel.Read More »

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The world of adults seen by a high school girl in the valley between school and home after school, and the sparkling poison that only a daughter of this age has, gradually spreads ripples in the world of adults.Read More »

The story of a young girl (Sachiko Hidari) who moves from a farm to the city of her dreams – Tokyo. Once settled as a maid, she realizes that the superiority of city life is only relative. Her employer’s son flees from Tokyo to the farm to see all the wonderful things the girl has told him about. When her employers go to pick up their son, the girl realizes that city folk are as ignorant of rural life as she was of city life.Read More »

The adaptation of a Akutagawa Prize-winning novel about a young man who becomes obsessed with a gun he’s found, a noir-tinged tale shot mostly in luminous black-and-white.Read More »

The only completely preserved silent film directed by Daisuke Ito, this film relates the life of a legendary thief, Jirokichi the Rat in an exquisite original story and through the revolutionary use of dynamic intertitles. The skillful benshi narration featuring a mixture of Edo dialect and Kansai dialect is highly entertaining.Read More »

17-year-old Salya grew up in Japan from an early age, leaving the place where she was born with a Kurdish family. She lived a normal high school life, just like the Japanese of her generation, and her relationship with Sota is becoming special but at some point she lost her status of residence in the shape of her life’s upside down. In Saitama, there is an area where about 2000 Kurds live, and Salya is a high school girl who lives there. However, when she learns that her family’s refugee status is turned down, restricting her family of work and travelling across the city. Her father, who had continued to work to sustain a living, is taken into custody for illegal employment. It tells the story of her growing up, suddenly being forced into a situation where she is responsible not only for her younger siblings but for her very existence.Read More »