Film★ 6.72005The SunA re-imagination of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power as WWII draws to a close.Open details →
Series★ 8.02004Prayer BeadsPrayer Beads, also called "omoinotama" or "nunju" in Japanese, are the small wooden beads strung on a loop used in Buddhist worship. The number of beads is typically 108, corresponding to the 108 earthly desires or sins that the beads have the power to extinguish. "Prayer Beads" is a series of 9 episodes of 30-minute dramas strung together, with the characters in each episode designing one thread of fate. The short independent episodes are skillfully linked together to become one story. The protagonists' dreams and fears and feelings about this life are all taken up and spun around to reach a dramatic conclusion in the final story.Open details →
Film★ 5.22004Drugstore GirlPharmaceutical student, Keiko witnesses her boyfriend having an affair. Shocked and disappointed, she jumps on a train ("destination anywhere, east or west, she don't care") and ends up in a town named Masao in Tokyo's remote suburbs. There, she gets a part-time job at a newly opened drugstore. What do ya know.. The local shopping district's middle-aged men all fall for the young girl's charms, and they start practicing lacrosse once they have found out that that's her favourite sport.Open details →
Film★ 6.71988Dogra MagraA young man murders his new bride and goes insane. He wakes in an asylum with no memory, left in the hands of two mysterious doctors who relate his condition with his biological identity.Open details →
Film★ 6.41984Mermaid LegendA married couple of abalone divers must confront ruthless investors taking over their coastline.Open details →
Film1981Grudge Girls Academy: Serial Murder of Fear!There are two bizarre rumors spreading about a girls' high school called “Seiwa Joshi Gakuen.” The first is a “Hanako-san in the Toilet”-like story about a painting that hangs in the principal's office = young twin sisters who escape from the painting at night and promenade around the school. The other is about Ryoko Mizumura, an art teacher who is too beautiful to be true and the object of the students' admiration, but who may actually be two people.Open details →
Film★ 6.31978Double Suicide of SonezakiSuicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating.Open details →
Film★ 6.41976Lullaby of the EarthThe story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world when her grandmother dies.Open details →
Film★ 6.21975Main Line to TerrorAkiyama is an intern, disgusted with the noise pollution caused by the bullet trains and the heart attacks that noise has been causing in older hospital patients, plots to disrupt and, in ten days, destroy a unit of the operation. He warns the Japan National Railway, that, if nothing is done to reduce the noise, he will derail a bullet train. Takigawa is the police detective sent to stop him.Open details →
Film★ 7.41971The WolvesAfter going to prison for killing the boss of the Kanno gang, Seji Iwahashi gets released early -- only to find that his former gang has merged with the Kannos. But with bitter resentments lingering on both sides, how long will it be before the bloodshed begins anew?Open details →
Film★ 9.01968Judge and JeopardyIt is based on the story "The Lawyer" by attorney Hiroshi Masaki and his account of Japan's "Headless Murder Case" in which a police officer beat a suspect to death during the Pacific War.Open details →
The River - Poem of WrathFilm1967The River - Poem of WrathA man sets out to search for his brother among the survivors of Hiroshima after an anonymous letter.Open details →