Movies: Kindai Eiga Kyokai

Reform schools are a way of protecting society by ridding it of lawless juvenile delinquents. But who's protecting the juvenile delinquents from corrupt reform schools? Rica could be considered a bit of an expert on reform schools, having spent most ...

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins ...

Shows the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath....

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The gover...

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on ...

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops....

A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many...

A retired actress whose husband has recently died visits her summer home. There she has encounters with old friends and acquaintances who bring various stories and news of death and the past...

A gas leak explosion at a yakuza hideout provides a shy nurse and a rental car clerk with the opportunity to take a briefcase full of money. A cross-country chase ensues....

An ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific line fishing. While the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the ship's navigator sees a flash. All the cre...

A group of five rookie insurance salespersons, driven to desperation by the impossibility of their work in Japan's failing postwar economy, form a plan to rob a cash delivery truck in order to provide for their families....

Michio Yamada, a recent school graduate, is sent to Tokyo to work as a fruit-packer in a department store as part of a government programme. He takes a gun from a house on an American base and uses it to kill several people. The scene changes to Yam...

It is based on the story of The Ballad of Narayama updated to the present day, with the substitution of putting a parent into an old people's home for the abandonment of the original. The film won the Golden St. George and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2...

First film of a trilogy following the dramatic life of Rika, a half-Japanese/half-American woman who becomes the tough-as-nails leader of an all-girl crime gang....

Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way....

A mother and daughter are stranded in small, isolated cabin, and are starving to death. In order to survive, they plan to entice men that happen to stray to their cabin with sex, and kill them. All goes well until a local cop shows up and, then, an o...

Based on Kakuko Mori's autobiography, about her life and retirement from acting due to her increasing blindness....

Toward the end of World War II, middle-aged soldier Keita is entrusted with a postcard from a comrade who is sure he will die in battle. After the war ends, Keita visits his comrade's wife Yuko and bears witness to the tragic life she has led....

A woman takes revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a younger woman by harassing the couple with unwanted phone calls at night....

Hamanaka Koichi returns to his wife Hisako and family in a sadder, run-down section of eastern Tokyo after having run away from home years before. He gives no explanation of his absence and his family asks no questions. It is only through the questio...