Kô Nishimura

An innocent man gets killed for the debt accumulated by his gambler son. This sets Okatsu, a master with the sword and an adopted daughter of the victim, on a path of revenge.Read More »

The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation.Read More »

Based on a mystery by Taiwanese-Japanese author Chin Shun-shin. After two elderly men in Yokohama quarrel over a Yang dynasty artifact, one of the men turns up dead with mysterious claw marks across his face. A detective takes up the case, and uncovers secrets dating back to war crimes committed during Japan’s invasion of China in WWII.Read More »

Quote:
Ten years after World War II, five people set out dig up a stash of morphine buried under a butcher shop in this black comedy by Shohei Imamura.Read More »

IMDb comments:
You can watch this crime drama as a sort of Japanese DESPERATE HOURS. A just married ordinary man has his family held as hostage by three hoodlums who want him to do something for them. Get a big package of money from his boss, and not a Yakuza. This is not a yakuza movie, folks, but a true suspense film, a bit far from what Kinji Fukasaku used to show us. A tale told with a terrific nick of time pace, with splendid editing and simple filming skills. The main lead character, the poor man who is lost in the city because he knows that he must obey to what the gangsters ordered him to do, this man’s play is so convincing. I was not lucky enough to see it with subtitles, and I am sure I unfortunately missed a lot. But I followed the basic scheme anyway. I would have imagined Koji Tsuruta as the husband’s character. A golden gem that deserves to be seen at all costs.Read More »

A hunchbacked caretaker presides over a forlorn mansion inhabited by the ghosts of his previous masters.An unbelieving trio(a doctor,his assistant and his niece)fail to heed the caretaker’s warnings and are slaughtered horribly by the jealous occupants.”The Ghost of the Hunchback” is one of the few Japanese haunted house movies made during 60’s.The film clearly resembles Italian Gothic horror films made by Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti.The acting is solid,the atmosphere is wonderfully spooky and foggy and there are some gruesome scenes.”The Ghost of the Hunchback” was released on tape in Italy under the title “Il Pozzo di Satana”.Read More »

Synopsis:
On 15 August 1955 at noon, on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, five people gather outside a train station, each of them wearing the emblem of the former imperial army on their chest. On the day of the surrender, an army general had hidden a can of priceless morphin in an air-raid shelter. It had been agreed then that the general and his three soldiers would meet ten years later to share their loot. Outside the station there is now one person too many. What’s more, one of them is a woman who claims she was married to the now dead general. The four men and the woman hire a house, aiming to turn it into a real estate agency. They start digging the ground to reach the spot where the can was buried. As their work progresses, each of them becomes a victim of their own selfishness, distrust and greed.Read More »

Synopsis:
When a local gambling house kidnaps some peasants because they failed to pay their debts, a rival gambling house pays their debts and sets them free. But it’s really all just a plot to enlist Ichi’s aid in eliminating the competition. Once that’s been attended to, the master of the surviving house of chance grabs more and more power – and more cash from the hapless farmers. Even a blind man can see that justice must be done.Read More »

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Imamura reveals remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.

“In ballsy, proto-Nick Broomfield fashion, Shohei Imamura puts himself directly in the line of danger to film THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN, a startling documentary glimpse of shady activity on the Phillipine high seas in the early 1970s. As an unintended side effect of bringing a camera crew into relatively unknown territory, Imamura also captures the experiences of native islanders eking out their day-to-day lives on both the poverty line and the idyllic shoreline.” —The CinefamilyRead More »