Movies: Kōjirō Kusanagi

Based on the life of Hyakken Uchida, a Japanese author and academic. The film opens with Uchida resigning his job as a German professor at the onset of WWII. The story is told mostly in vignettes as he is cared for by former students in his old age....

A former boxer gets involved with a club hostess trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer....

A young virgin is captured by an abnormal couple. The girl is kept locked in a wooden box, and subjected to sexual torture and abuse. Loosely inspired by the real-life case of Colleen Stan....

A policeman is murdered and his gun, stolen, used to commit the next crime. Detective Kashiwagi, who is leading the investigation, learns that the author of the killings “walks like a dead man”. Kashiwagi runs into Date, a former correspondent in the...

A high school science teacher is the butt of all his students' jokes, until their bus is hijacked on a school trip. But something more sinister lurks beneath the surface: he's building an atomic bomb in his apartment....

Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidatio...

A re-imagination of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power as WWII draws to a close....

A seemingly run-of-the-mill corporate salaryman leads a double life as a vicious criminal by night. In a delicious scheme of payback, he seeks to dominate the corporation that employs him by day....

1980 Japanese film distributed by Shochiku....

Ichi is staying at an inn when a woman dies. Her dying wish is that Ichi take her son to his father, an artist living in a nearby town. After arriving in the town, Ichi finds out that the father has been forced by a local boss to create illegal porno...

A gang lord hires Kamimura, a hit man, to take out a rival boss who's gotten greedy....

A serious-minded policeman plays the role of robber in a police training operation against bank robberies. He's so good his fellow policemen can't catch him. TV networks begin to broadcast the operation nationwide. TV audiences are amused and root fo...

Yoshida’s first big-budget production and colour film is a haunting tale of unrequited love and postwar disillusion. The story of the fatal attraction between a spineless intellectual and a strong woman is conventional, but its enactment is radically...

The story of the silk industry and the young girls who worked as silk spinners in the early 1900s in Japan. The silk mills were located in Okaya which lies just beyond the Nomugi Pass. The women and girls worked in a hot, humid atmosphere without res...

Businessmen arrange the early release from prison of Togawa, serving time for taking revenge on the truck driver whose carelessness confined Togawa's sister, Rie, to a wheelchair. They want Togawa to hijack an armored truck loaded with 120 million ye...

A juvenile delinquent gets out of the pen and immediately embarks on a rampage of untethered anger, most of it directed at the girlfriend of the journalist who helped send him up....

A young girl is striving for stardom. In order to get a lead role in a new production, she agrees to stand-in for a famous star whose rich patron died in her arms one night. The real-life drama gradually comes to mirror the story of the play being pe...

Set in Japan's Tenpyou era (729-749 CE), four young monks are sent to China to study Buddhism and bring a high priest back to Japan with them. The film tells the tale of the four monks' youth and the life and times of the high priest Ganjin....

Sukezo, a former manga comic artist, takes up the art rock business by setting up a shop in a shed by the river. He tries hard to be successful, but business does not go well and the family becomes progressively poorer....

When beautiful forensic scientist Kyoko and her colleagues fail to uncover clues to the identity of a man who brutally attacks and kills women, she agrees to become the bait to lure the killer into a police snare. But as the murderer remains frustrat...