Battle Troop
Three IJN flyers Mikami (Susumu Fujita), Kawakami (Masayuki Mori) and Murakami (Akitake Kono) are good friends, and they are all renowned for their torpedo techniques. Mikami is posted as a…
Mother
Castle of Owls
Movie adaptation of the 1959 ninja novel. With war against Korea looming on the horizon, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the ‘Taiko’ becomes the target of an assassination attempt to be carried out…
Good-for-Nothing
Yoshida’s first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a “good-for-nothing” from a poor background falls in…
Five Men of Edo
During the 17th Century roving bands of hatamoto were causing trouble in the new capital city of Edo and constantly fought with the townspeople at every turn. The leader of…
Ginza Cosmetics
Italy is usually cited as the anchor of the neo-realist movement in cinema, but Mikio Naruse’s Ginza Cosmetics (1951) is a reminder that Japan had its own output equally rooted…
Late Spring
Noriko is perfectly happy living at home with her widowed father, Shukichi, and has no plans to marry — that is, until her aunt Masa convinces Shukichi that unless he…
The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
A Japanese pacifist, unable to face the dire consequences of conscientious objection, is transformed by his attempts to compromise with the demands of war-time Japan.