Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.
Kii, a young woman who isn't good at studying or sports, finds her passion in life through amateur photography. While trying to take a good shot one afternoon, she meets fledgling singer Yuu by chance and together they move towards the light of accomplishing their dreams.
In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.
The classic story of English POWs in Burma forced to build a bridge to aid the war effort of their Japanese captors. British and American intelligence officers conspire to blow up the structure, but Col. Nicholson, the commander who supervised the bridge's construction, has acquired a sense of pride in his creation and tries to foil their plans.
Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.
2 days until the “Last Graduation Ceremony” of high school, the building was to be demolished. Each student accepted their “farewell to youth” and moved forward with regret and hope in mind. One student visits the library to meet her secret admirer who is also her teacher, one calls her boyfriend with a strained relationship due to the distance of their colleges, one is trying to expose a secret that she hid for the last 3 years, and the last student, Manami, has to give a speech during the graduation ceremony but couldn’t overcome her pain.
37 year old sales manager Iwatsu is so caught up in work, he's unable to truly live his life. One night while looking at his graduation album on his phone, he receives a sudden call from a girl named Kana. He's taken to his hometown Kobe, where he lived as a teenager. Slowly, by way of Kana, Iwatsu's past is resuscitated.
Ai's mother sends her to live with a cult commune, where she remains for seven years. After the cult is broken up by the police, Ai struggles to fit in with society.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
A coming-of-age story about a high-school girl who wants to use magic, featuring the 11-member experimental band Vampillia
A strikingly beautiful young woman is trained from birth to be a deadly instrument of revenge against the swindlers who destroyed her family.
A Swiss nun falls in love with a Japanese engineer.
In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.
In Edo-era Japan, a ukiyo-e artist languishes in his master’s shadow. Creatively stifled, he finds consolation in the company of a prostitute, and becomes entangled in a love triangle. A mystery emerges involving two portraits and the sudden disappearance of the artist Sharaku. Helmed by Cannes-selected director Tatsuji Yamazaki, the film employs kabuki-inspired sequences and stylised sets.
A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
Two New York cops get involved in a gang war between members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. They arrest one of their killers and are ordered to escort him back to Japan. However, in Japan he manages to escape, and as they try to track him down, they get deeper and deeper into the Japanese Mafia scene and they have to learn that they can only win by playing the game—the Japanese way.
There were five Marines and one Navy Corpsman photographed raising the U.S. flag on Mt. Suribachi by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945. This is the story of three of the six surviving servicemen - John 'Doc' Bradley, Pvt. Rene Gagnon and Pvt. Ira Hayes - who fought in the battle to take Iwo Jima from the Japanese.
Returning to their lord's castle, samurai warriors Washizu and Miki are waylaid by a spirit who predicts their futures. When the first part of the spirit's prophecy comes true, Washizu's scheming wife, Asaji, presses him to speed up the rest of the spirit's prophecy by murdering his lord and usurping his place. Director Akira Kurosawa's resetting of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in feudal Japan is one of his most acclaimed films.
Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.