Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, "Rashomon" is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.
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 Girl Named Ann
Masaya is a university student, but he attends a school that's not his ideal school. His days are generally gloomy. One day, he receives a letter from serial killer Haimura. He was convicted for nine murders and received the death penalty. Back when Haimura was committing his murders, he ran a bakery store. At that time, Masaya was a middle-school student and a customer at his bakery store. According to the letter, Haimura confesses to having committed eight murders, but he insists that he did not commit the last murder. Masaya begins to investigate the last murder case involving Haimura.
In a dystopian present, a young Japanese-American man battles the cascading effects of his family's wrongful incarceration in the 1940s.
Yuma Nakahara is the CEO of an IT company and he is a workaholic. He is focused only on expanding his company. He receives a phone call from his former co-worker and friend Kouhei, but Kouhei doesn't say anything. Yuma gets the sense that something is wrong and heads to Kouhei's hometown of Shinminato, Toyama Prefecture, Japan. In Shinminato, Yuma meets other people and becomes involved in the Shinminato Hikiyama Festival. His outlook on life begins to change.
The Ganso and Honke are two medical wholesalers which have had a long history of exchanges. They were originally a wholesaler set up by Tokiya Manemon who invented a drug. After he fell ill, he imparted the formula to his two beloved disciples. But the two were at loggerheads and the enmity between them caused a split into two factions, the ‘original’ (Ganso) and the ‘originator’ (Honke). One day, an incident finally occurred. Kiichiro (Endo Kaname), the eldest son of the Honke, launched an attack on the young master of the Ganso, Nagahiko (Oshinari Shugo).
A member of an elite paramilitary counter-terrorism unit becomes traumatized after witnessing the suicide bombing of a young girl and is forced to undergo retraining. However, unbeknownst to him, he becomes a key player in a dispute between rival police divisions, as he finds himself increasingly involved with the sister of the girl he saw die.
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.
Starting in 1970s Hokkaido, the film charts the moral descent of Detective Moroboshi over three decades, the young cop quickly gets a bit too cozy with the other side of the law when his senior colleague Murai teaches him the ropes and ruts of the police business. Soon, he swaggers and rants through the streets of Sapporo a lean, mean, sex‐crazy bully, indistinguishable from a yakuza.
Adapted by Yasumi Toshio and directed by Toyoda Shiro, this is a literary work based on a full-length novel of the same name published by Shiga Naoya of the Shirakaba School.
A pioneering roboticist awakens in 2025 after decades in cryosleep. To change the past and reunite with his adopted sister, he seeks a way back to 1995.
Five short stories from five different directors set ten years in Japan's future.
Action actor Tateishi Daisuke who struggles with loneliness after suffering a traumatic experience due to an accident during filming. One day, he comes across a senior high school girl Ayumi who is being harassed consistently by Chinese brokers and the local yakuza. He decides to protect her from them. However, after this incident, he comes to develop a mindset of seeing violence as a way to gain the affirmation and approval of others thus gradually loses himself and behaves in an extreme manner.
Haruo Izawa is 45 years old and the floor chief of the local grocery store “Umeya”. He is highly trusted by Store Manager Ueda and the part-time ladies and the Ohara branch is the only place where he has been working for 25 years. Although he says that he doesn’t fit to be a store manager, he is still concerned about HR and career advancement. That’s why Ueda’s praise "command center" is his only treasure. Besides, he is also a husband of his wife Ritsuko, and a father of two daughters and a son, Koume, Kanako, and Ryota at home. Humor and pathos are said to be only a fine line, but Haruo’s fruitless actions of paying attention to the human relationships and atmosphere and overthinking never stop.. Where is this middle-aged man’s turmoil going??
Shoko and Mutsuki get married to satisfy their worried parents, but she is well past the age at which a 'good' Japanese woman should marry, and he is in love with a young male college student. The film is less a realistic exploration of gay life than a fairy tale of three young Japanese trying to construct an alternative to the sexual and familial roles given to them by a society turning increasingly emotionally barren.
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
Taking advantage of their summer holiday, Kō and his little sister Yae visit their cousin at Nozaki located at the sea-side. However, on the day they arrive, a typhoon hits the town for the first time in many years. At this time, their cousin tells them: When the storm hits, the spirits of those who perished at sea... will return.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.