An expedition in the South Pacific lands on a tropical island where the natives worship the mysterious deity Gappa. An earthquake opens up an underground cavern and a baby reptile is discovered inside. The natives warn the foreigners to leave the hatching alone, but they don't listen and take it...
A celebrity, dissatisfied with his personal and professional lives, impulsively leaves fast-paced Tokyo to deliver a much-needed jeep to a remote village. When his controlling manager, the woman he loves, follows, the two must reconcile while dodging reporters.
The moment he's released from prison, the honorable gangster Miyamoto recovers the stolen diamonds he had stashed before getting pinched. When he returns to his haunt to make good by friend who took a bullet for him, he is diverted by the greedy boss Oyane and his insatiable taste for Miyamoto's...
Businessmen arrange the early release from prison of Togawa, serving time for taking revenge on the truck driver whose carelessness confined Togawa's sister, Rie, to a wheelchair. They want Togawa to hijack an armored truck loaded with 120 million yen; their leverage is to promise him money for...
Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidation is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully...
Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for his troubles.
The eldest daughter of a rural family Mon returns home from Tokyo pregnant after an affair with a college student Kobata, which causes a scandal that will threaten the marriage prospects of the younger sister San, in her cash-strapped family. The ill-tempered eldest brother Inokichi decides to take...
Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of her life, she meets a young journalist from...
Reiko Oshida stars as a young wannabe gangster tough girl, just released from reform school. She tracks down one of her classmates fathers, who runs an auto repair shop that the local Yakuza are trying to force out of business and take over, and starts working for him. At the same time a recently...
Jiro Sone sacrifices all comfort to devote himself to research. Young housewife Yachiyo is disappointed with her husband Kappei, who is more attracted to mountain climbing and another girl. When Yachiyo’s father is introduced to Jiro, all of their lives become intertwined...
Goro (Tetsuya Watari) wants to put his dark past behind. He heads to Hirosaki City to offer his condolences to Yumeko and to reunite with Yukiko (Chieko Matsubara), but finds that Yumeko is fatally ill. Although Yukiko was taking care of her, she is pressed for money. Goro wants to help and knows...
Akira, a young, jazz-obsessed drifter, returns to his squat, a ruined church, and finds Gill, a wounded African-American GI, on the run after the death of a white GI. Despite terrible misunderstandings and culture clash, Akira agrees to help Gill escape towards the sea, dodging military police...
In 1943, Japan is amidst the Pacific War. Sobei Sonoda is one of the wealthiest landowners of the San'in region. His land spread for miles, as far as the eye can see. People treated him with respect. But even the richest must think about the future. One day, he decides to arrange a marriage between...
In the thriving Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza, a woman in the process of selling her estranged husband’s art collection attempts to identify the man who painted her own portrait fifteen years prior.
Mourning the death of her boyfriend, Yukiko wanders aimlessly from one city to another. During her mourning, she becomes addicted to gambling. One day, a man that resembles her deceased lover asks for help. He's being pursued by a dangerous gang of yakuza.
In the dying months of the Meiji era, a sympathetic student befriends a married couple, but soon realizes they share a curiously strained relationship stemming from an unknown incident in their past.