Movies: Japanese noir

Japanese police detective Saburo Fujioka is suspected of corruption, demoted, and sent to the city of Kojin. Kojin is the scene of fierce fighting between rival gangs. Fujioka is assigned to investigate the death of the wife of gangster Tetsuo Maruya...

When a married man begins an affair with a woman from his past, he comes to suspect her young son intends to murder him....

In the midst of an attempt to take over his company, a powerhouse executive is hit with a huge ransom demand when his chauffeur's son is kidnapped by mistake....

In this loose adaptation of "Hamlet," illegitimate son Kôichi Nishi climbs to a high position within a Japanese corporation and marries the crippled daughter of company vice president Iwabuchi. At the reception, the wedding cake is a replica of their...

Kaze is a philandering TV producer. His wife and nine of his mistresses conspire to kill him. However each woman would rather keep him alive, as long as she was the only woman in his life....

College students come up with a scam to rob a gambling house. When it comes time to collect, the money isn't there, leading the young men into even more serious crime....

After yakuza boss Kurata dissolves his own criminal empire, a rival kingpin offers a position to Kurata's top operative, Tetsuya "Phoenix Tetsu" Hondo. When the fiercely loyal Tetsu declines, Otsuka taps unstoppable Tatsuzo the "Viper", a ruthless gu...

Gang of robbers quarrel about the loot, but when one of them gets killed, his younger brother seeks them out to ice them one by one....

It tells the story of a couple who fall into a trap set up by a sinister organization. One of them is a guy who is framed for the murder of his lover. The other is a woman pick-pocket who is entrapped by the organization's schemes involving their cri...

A promising post-graduate literature student is transformed into a psychotic killer following the suicide of his father and a sleazy affair by his mother with a younger man....

A youth drama set in a Japanese university which is home to a group of active, leftist students....

A gangster gets released from prison and has to cope with the recent shifts of power between the gangs, while taking care of a thrill-seeking young woman, who got in bad company while gambling....

Shortly after arriving in Kobe, "Jiro the Lefty", a killer with a natural talent, witnesses a man die in a crane accident which turns out to be a cover-up for a murder. Jiro soon finds himself on the run, tailed by a determined cop....

Based on the original novel by Tokuda Shusei, adapted by frequent Masumura scribe Kaneto Shindo, this downbeat melodrama features a battle of women for the affections and commitment of the same man, a handsome car salesman. Masuko is the number one h...

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....

Film director and screenwriter Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017), who in the sixties was the great innovator of Japanese cinema; and his collaborator, art director and screenwriter Takeo Kimura (1918-2010), recall how they made their great masterpieces about...

Set in post-war Japan, a group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminat...

A top police-guard, charged with protecting a visiting politician and ruthless dictator, contends with an assassin set to kill the man....

Raizô Ichikawa reprises his role as the restaurant-cook-turned-contract-killer in this sequel to Kazuo Mori's stylish 1967 thriller A Certain Killer....

When 150 guns are stolen from Iwakuni base and two police officers are shot dead, a detective criminal tries to find out the truth....