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 ...

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...

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

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....

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

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....

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

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 ...

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....

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....

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...

A 1977 Japanese biographical film directed by Kaneto Shindo based on the life of shamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan....

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...

A civic music group, created by Tsukasa Nitta, a high school teacher in Koriyama City, and Akiko Watanabe, the daughter of a record shop and teacher of a music class, invites Takuro Yoshida to Koriyama City to hold a concert. He then starts being har...

After the closure of a coal mine leaves her husband unemployed, Fumiko travels from Kyushu to Kyoto with her daughter Kimiko, and they become hostesses at a cabaret....

The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out....

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...

“Quit working as a nurse!” “All right, I will!” thus began the married life of Yasuo and Keiko. But the reality is harsh. Keiko even had to work on the first night after her marriage. Ten years later, the married couple is still at it. Yauso tends to...