Best Japanese Films Kinema Junpo (1926-2025)

2004 film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Sophie, a young milliner, is turned into an elderly woman by a witch who enters her shop and curses her. She encounters a wizard named Howl and gets caught up in his resistance to fighting for the king.

2004 film by Shunji Iwai

Suzu lives with Furuta, her fiance, but one day she leaves home without saying a word. She moves into the apartment of her friend Abe, but he has gone abroad and Yoko now lives in his apartment. Suzu and Yoko, who have known each other since childhood and have both always loved Furuta, thus find themselves sharing the same home.

2004 film by Masaaki Yuasa

Hoping to catch a girl's attention, high school students Ken and Adama cook up an ambitious plan. They plan a festival that combines film, theater, and rock music, and develop their project into a school road block. This plan however catches the attention of television stations and newspapers, and soon even the cops became involved in this teenage adventure.

2004 film by Yoichi Sai

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

While searching for his fiancee Ritsuko, Sakutarou rediscovers through flashbacks the void deep within him caused by the events from his high school days.

In a small town on the countryside, every young boy is forced to have the same bowl-head haircut known as the "Yoshino-gari" hairstyle. Then one day, a drastic change occurs when a transfer student with bleached hair comes from Tokyo.

Commencing well-respected Nippon director Kazuo Kuroki's sixth decade behind the camera, "A Boy's Summer in 1945" (literally "A Beautiful Summer in Kirishima") is a lyric, novelistic drama set in the countryside in the last days before Japan's surrender ending WWII. Striking a welcome retro note in its languid pacing and delicate handling of seriocomic ensemble threads, handsome production is a natural for fests. It might also prove a cornerstone for retrospectives or ancillary releases of works by a helmer ("Preparation of the Festival," "Ronin-gai") who's long been appreciated at home but has won just limited attention abroad.

A man is trying to flee from his past, and he ends up in an underworld filled with strange characters. He finds a job skewering meat in a dirty old room in a shabby old house filled with prostitutes, gangsters and a weird old tattoo master. He clearly doesn't fit in to this new world, and the inhabitants of it immediately despise him.

Rei is a freelance writer embattled by personal demons. She hears voices in her head, and has sleeping problems, eating disorders and drinks excessively. On Valentine's Day, she meets truck driver Takatoshi. She joins him on a journey in his bumpy and shaky truck - which vibrates in tune with her uneasy soul.

Tsuneo is a university student working part-time in a mah-jong parlour. Lately the customers have been talking about an old lady who pushes a baby carriage through the streets. They say she is carrying something for a crime syndicate, and they wonder what it is she has in the carriage Money? Drugs? One day, the owner of the mah-jong parlour sends Tsuneo out to walk his dog. A baby carriage comes rolling down a hill and crashes into a guard rail. The old lady asks him to look into the carriage, where he finds a young woman clutching a knife. This is how Tsuneo first meets the girl who calls herself Josee.

The four Takezawa sisters discover that their father has an illegitimate child so they hire a private detective to investigate.

Three women who share memories of the Hiroshima disaster try to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together.

2003 Japanese film by Takeshi Kitano

A poor village in the Tohoku area has a law that states when a resident becomes sixty years old, they must move to the place called Warabino, far away from home.

Shortly after hearing from a colleague about a woman whose brother committed suicide after seeing his doppelgänger, a Japanese engineer on the verge of a breakthrough in medical technology is confronted by his own.

A young Japanese boy's life is changed when his sister returns to the small island, full of eccentric characters, where he lives.