MOVIES JAPANESE

Every year, the Yokoyama clan gets together to honor the life of eldest son Junpei, drowned 15 years earlier while saving a man from drowning. Retired physician father Shohei still mourns, while his wife Toshiko has become a passive-aggressive domestic goddess, the two bicker continually. Surviving son Ryota has married at last-his new wife Yukari is a widow with a young son. Daughter Chinami and her car-salesman husband have their two kids in tow....

A widowed high school teacher finds that the more he tries to do what is best for his son's future, the more they are separated.

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next. At once disturbing and oddly amusing, Oshima's constantly surprising film is a subversive and surreal indictment of both capital punishment and the treatment of Korean immigrants in his country.

Two years after his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku arrives in Hiroshima to direct a production of Uncle Vanya for a theater festival and, through relationships with an actor with whom he shares a tangled history and a chauffeur with whom he develops a surprising rapport, finds himself confronting emotional scars. This quietly mesmerizing tale of love, art, grief, and healing is ultimately a cathartic exploration of what it means to go on living...

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, it is a subtly piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife's city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband's small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change, in the form of their headstrong, modern niece, sweeps over their...

"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 Technicolor...

Peace in 17th-century Japan causes the Shogunate's breakup of warrior clans, throwing thousands of samurai out of work and into poverty. An honorable end to such fate under the samurai code is ritual suicide, or hara-kiri.

A grand-scale adventure as only Akira Kurosawa could make one. A general charged with guarding his defeated clan's princess as the two smuggle royal treasure across hostile territory. Accompanying them are a pair of bumbling, conniving peasants who may or may not be their friends. This rip-roaring ride is among the director₂s most beloved films and was a primary influence on George Lucas₂s Star Wars. Delivers Kurosawa₂s trademark deft blend...

A Tokyo family's unassuming lifestyle is turned upside down by the increasingly bizarre antics of their strange new tenant.

Twelve-year-old Koichi, separated from his brother Ryunosuke due to his parents' divorce, begins to believe that Japan's new bullet train service will create a miracle when the first trains pass each other at top speed, and enlists a group of friends on an improbable mission.