05 Apr 2025
After the Quake
Based on four of the six short stories compiled in Murakami Haruki's anthology, After the Quake explores the complex aftermath of Japan’s earthquakes and other global crises.
Sen no Rikyu (Ebizo Ichikawa) is the son of a fish shop owner. Sen no Rikyu then studies tea and eventually becomes one of the primary influences upon the Japanese tea ceremony. With his elegant esthetics, Sen no Rikyu is favored by the most powerful man in Japan Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Nao Omori) and becomes one of his closest advisors. Due to conflicts, Toyotomi Hideyoshi then orders Sen no Rikyu to commit seppuku (suicide). Director Mitsutoshi Tanaka's adaptation of Kenichi Yamamoto's award-winning novel of the same name received the Best Artistic Contribution Award at the 37th Montréal World Film Festival, the Best Director Award at the 2014 Osaka Cinema Festival, the 30th Fumiko Yamaji Cultural Award and the 37th Japan Academy Film Prize in nine categories, including Best Art Direction, Excellent Film and Excellent Actor.
Sen no Rikyu
Son
Hideyoshi Toyotomi
Joseon noblewoman
05 Apr 2025
Based on four of the six short stories compiled in Murakami Haruki's anthology, After the Quake explores the complex aftermath of Japan’s earthquakes and other global crises.
28 May 2022
A cursed dancer and a blind musician — both ostracized by society — become business partners and inseparable friends as their larger-than-life concerts propel them to stardom in 14th century Japan.
12 Jan 2013
Teacher Akira Suzuki breaks away from long-held customs and norms at his school. He tries hard to have the ideal classroom by using his own "Suzuki method". The new semester begins. His homeroom 2-A class is about to have a student council election and preparations for a school festival. A man then takes a female student hostage...
07 Sep 2014
This erotically charged drama traces the intersecting stories of a group of employees and visitors at a notorious "love hotel" in Tokyo's red-light district.
21 Jan 1961
In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.
21 Dec 1974
When George Tanner does business with high-ranking Yakuza Tono, Tono kidnaps his daughter, and George summons his old friend, private eye Harry Kilmer, to Japan to investigate.
31 Jan 2009
The story of a teenage boy named Yu, who falls for Yoko, a girl he runs into while working as an "up-skirt" photographer in an offshoot of the porn industry. His attempts to woo her are complicated by a spot of cross-dressing – which convinces Yoko that she is lesbian – dalliances with kung-fu and crime, and a constant struggle with the guilt that's a legacy of his Catholic upbringing.
20 Mar 2025
Sasaki is a sincere civil servant, working at city hall. Due to his timid personality, he can't properly deal with nasty people, including a single mother on the verge of giving up her own child, another civil servant pressing him to have a physical relationship, and a person who receives welfare benefits unfairly. His passivity leads him to get caught up in a terrible crime.
15 Jul 1966
A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality.
20 Jan 2000
Two middle aged German brothers - one New Age and recently divorced, the other uptight and sceptical - travel to a Zen monastery in Japan in search of enlightenment, or perhaps just in search of themselves.
23 Feb 2023
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.
03 Sep 2005
Two girls named Nana meet on a train to Tokyo. Nana K. aims to reunite with her boyfriend and Nana O. hopes to make it big in the music business. Despite their differences, the pair hit it off and become roommates.
10 Jun 2017
The third work in the "Not in Textbooks!" series, which is a live-action movie of a popular love comedy manga by Kazuto Okada from "Sundome" starring Ayaka Morikawa from the former AKB48. It depicts the love pattern that the main character, a high school girl Aya Shirakaba and a homeroom teacher, Arihiko Tairaku, living together for a long time. One day, Okubo, a senior student who noticed Aya who is very popular in the school with excellent looks, abducts Aya. Tairaku heads to the rescue and falls into the worst situation. On the other hand, in the school there was an incident in which May Yayoi took the students hostage.... Morikawa played the role of Aya Shirakaba, Ryouma Baba played the role of Arihiko Tairaku, and May, an English teacher longing for Tairaku, was the debut performance of the rising gravure idol Anna Hongo.
17 Jun 2017
The fourth in a school romantic comedy that features a popular comic by Kazuto Okada starring Ayaka Morikawa and Ryouma Baba. One day, a love letter arrives under the Japanese language teacher, Tairaku Arihiko, at Otome High School. Around the same time, an incident occurred around the student, Aya Shirakaba, who was living with him...
19 Oct 1974
Two detectives are tasked to investigate the murder of an old man, found bludgeoned to death in a Tokyo rail yard.
12 May 1959
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
10 Jan 2009
In the early 1200s, Dogen brought Chinese Zen philosophy to Japan, and established the Japanese Zen school of Buddhism. He taught that a person was capable of realizing Buddhahood within himself, by way of Zazen. Zazen is extended hours of sitting and meditating to achieve a state of “Mu” (nothingness, or empty existence).
13 Mar 2004
Two teenage best pals attracted to the same boy end up scrambling his life after he walks into a door and is knocked unconscious.
15 Jul 2006
In the aftermath of a major earthquake, scientists predict that Japan will sink into the sea. As further disasters follow, politicians plead with other countries to take refugees, while scientists struggle to save Japan itself.
13 Sep 2008
Daigo, a cellist, is laid off from his orchestra and moves with his wife back to his small hometown where the living is cheaper. Thinking he’s applying for a job at a travel agency he finds he’s being interviewed for work with departures of a more permanent nature – as an undertaker’s assistant.