Brash, loudmouthed and opportunistic, Kikujiro is the unlikely companion for Masao who is determined to see the mother he has never met. The two begin a series of adventures which soon turns out to be a whimsical journey of laughter and tears with a wide array of surprises and unique characters along the way.
Detective Nishi is relieved from a stakeout to visit his sick wife in hospital. He is informed that she is terminally ill, and is advised to take her home. During his visit, a suspect shoots one detective dead and leaves Nishi's partner, Horibe, paralyzed. Nishi leaves the police force to spend time with his wife at home, and must find a way to pay off his debts to the yakuza.
Five years after the all-out war between the Sanno and Hanabishi crime families, former yakuza boss Otomo works in South Korea for Mr. Chang, a noted fixer. When tensions rise between Chang and the Hanabishi, and Chang's life is endangered, Otomo returns to Japan to settle things once and for all.
Blind traveler Zatoichi is a master swordsman and a masseur with a fondness for gambling on dice games. When he arrives in a village torn apart by warring gangs, he sets out to protect the townspeople.
Four independent stories set in modern China about random acts of violence.
Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.
A Japanese Yakuza gangster’s deadly existence in his homeland gets him exiled to Los Angeles, where he is taken in by his little brother and his brother’s gang.
The lives of a young, hearing-impaired and gloomy couple are fulfilled after the boy holds interest in surfboarding.
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.
While pursuing his dream of having car sex, a goofy middle-aged man makes all the wrong moves and ends up enrolling in a number of crazy escapades.
Shinji and Masaru spend most of their school days harassing fellow classmates and playing pranks. They drop out and Shinji becomes a small-time boxer, while Masaru joins up with a local yakuza gang. However, the world is a tough place.
Izo is an assassin in the service of a Tosa lord and Imperial supporter. After killing dozens of the Shogun's men, Izo is captured and crucified. Instead of being extinguished, his rage propels him through the space-time continuum to present-day Tokyo. Here Izo transforms himself into a new, improved killing machine.
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Ryuzo and his 7 former henchmen are all retired yakuza, but they now live as regular old men. One day, Ryuzo becomes the victim of a phishing fraud. He calls his 7 men together to reform their society.
Machisu is a painter. He never had the success he thinks he is entitled to. Regardless of this, he always remains trying to be successful. His wife Sachiko keeps supporting him, despite all setbacks.
Beat Takeshi lives the busy and sometimes surreal life of a showbiz celebrity. One day he meets his blond lookalike named Kitano, a shy convenience store cashier, who, still an unknown actor, is waiting for his big break. After their paths cross, Kitano seems to begin hallucinating about becoming Beat.
24 City chronicles the dramatic closing of a once-prosperous state-owned factory in Chengdu, southwest China and its conversion into a sprawling luxury apartment complex. Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.
Takeshi Kitano plays a version of himself in which he's a struggling director cycling through a number of different genres in an effort to complete his latest project.
Tanaka is going through a tough time trying to support his younger sister Mitsuko, recently arrested and hold up in jail. As an investigative reporter, he immerses himself into a story about a shocking murder case gone cold; a family was brutally murdered a year ago and the case remains unsolved.
Three disaffected youths live in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.
Things are hectic in heaven. Dozens of scribes sit before a long scroll incessantly scribbling away. They are composing the biographies of earth-dwellers. What is invented by the men in heaven is lived out below. And their employer, God, is increasingly vehement in demanding avant-garde ideas. Take, for example, the beautiful Yuri, a girl who dies in a car crash. Some of the heavenly scribes find this very dull and send former gangster Chas, who has become a heavenly tea-boy, back down to earth with instructions to save Yuri no matter what. And so Chas ends up in Okinawa, gets to know the earth-dwellers, interferes in their fates, becomes celebrated as 'Mr Angel' and is hounded by brutal enemies. His falling in love with Yuri is of course a foregone conclusion. But no one could anticipate what happens next. Not even God himself.
Industrial Hitachi City is the location for this post-3.11 drama. Still recovering from the tsunami, Shiori receives news of her husband’s accidental death, which marks the start of a personal recovery that mirrors the town’s for Shiori as well as forgiveness of surviving coworker Takumi.
Acclaimed director Abolfazl Jalili offers a compassionate story of the young Afghan refugee who lives illegally in Iran. 14-year-old Kaim drifts to the Delbaran crossing on the Afghan-Iran border, where he finds work at a coffee shop frequented by truck drivers. He feels at home in this small oasis of friendliness, though the sounds of war can be heard in the background, violent bandits prowl the roads, and opium is everywhere. As we watch Kaim run from one task to another day after day, we soon realize that we are watching a boy who is being cheated out of his childhood.
Double revenge in two separate stories. Set in both a near future and the historical past, revenge is served not by violence, but by love.
Seven families are aboard a bus towards a field camp for their vacation. At this camp, it becomes clear that this is not a common trip. The parents are of the kind that abused their children or were visited by children´s services, and at the camp they are offered to sell their children for a large sum of money, because there were customers that needed healthy internal organs.
Jean-Pierre Limosin follows Takeshi Kitano on the set of Kikujiro, films it during an interview with Shiguehiko Hasumi, president of the University of Tokyo and who, as a great film buff, was one of the first to recognize directorial talents of Takeshi Kitano.
Documents the events surrounding the making of 'Kikujiro no natsu'.
Soon after he lands in America, Ali, a Muslim man from Pakistan, begins his search for his estranged wife, Nadia. On his journey, Ali meets with Teppei, a Japanese traveller hitchhiking his way across America, and Sarah, a local trailer park girl, who help him in his search. The three travellers succeed in finding Nadia, who, to Ali’s dismay, is living a new life in Phoenix with another man. Ali spends the rest of his stay in America with Teppei and Sarah, anxiously wondering where his life is leading. In the brief time they are together, the three companions commit to helping one another. Ali, Teppei and Sarah begin a new journey, to find their own individual identities and in the process they find each other. Big River is a road movie, a tale about the borderless realm of friendship and its ability to transcend culture.
Memories can be blocked, but they can also be invented. Psychology professor Eiko works with people who were traumatized by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster. But the topic affects her more personally than she wants to admit. Narrative structures begin to intertwine, reality becomes ambiguous. Like a surgeon, SHINOZAKI dissects the human mind in this complex yet moving film.
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