Best Japanese Films Kinema Junpo (1926-2025)

1970s Japan saw the rise of biker gangs, known as Bōsōzoku, which drew the interest of the media. God Speed You! Black Emperor follows a member of the bike gang and his interaction with his parents, after he gets in trouble with the police.

In 39 interviews with actors and actresses, writers, producers and staff members, interspersed with film excerpts and stills, Shindō recounts the life and career of his friend and mentor Mizoguchi.

Tateo, young and neurotic, wishes to leave the village his mother has raised him in.

1974 film by Shūji Terayama

A Japanese bullet train is threatened with a bomb that will explode automatically if the train slows below 80 km/h, unless a ransom is paid. Police race to find the bombers so the train crew can learn how to defuse the bomb.

A self-destructive man becomes a powerful member of the yakuza but quickly loses his self-control. Based on the true story of Rikio Ishikawa.

This appears to be a labor of love. Its about a village which is given the opportunity to put on a musical. They would have to pay the overhead and, being that they are farmers and always busy and not rich, question the wisdom and feasibility of such an idea. A spokesperson for the acting troupe Ms. Kono lays out the whole thing and they must decide. You get little slices of rural life in Japan far, at least in sentiment, from Tokyo. The best thing about this film is that it has heart. The acting is good, but it is really about the simple storyline of outing on a show. Films rarely get made with such simplistic plots these days. Enjoy this little slice of what city people call “the simple life”.

A true-life tale of a broken woman whose hedonistic tryst with a high-class restaurateur resulted in a horrific crime of passion that littered Tokyo headlines in 1936.

After his leading actress becomes pregnant and wants to quit, Juzo, an adult film director, becomes obsessed with finding the woman whose moaning he captured secretly at a dentist’s office to star in the film instead.

The sea around Minamata was heavily polluted with mercury during the 1950s and 1960s from the Chisso Corporation's chemical factory. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in shellfish and fish in the Yatsushiro Sea which, when eaten by the local populace, gave rise to Minamata disease. The disease was responsible for the deaths and disabling of thousands of residents, all around the Yatsushiro Sea. The marine ecosystem was also extensively damaged.

During the military phase of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Sentaro joins a local militia loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate in order to fight Imperial troops. But Sentaro's friendship with a pickpocket, who switches sides whenever it suits his needs, leads to complications that could cost Sentaro his life as they infiltrate enemy lines.

Nakadai is an English teacher at a local school. He’s put-upon like the patron figure of dozens of films and televisions shows. Viewers who are especially fans of Nakadai will appreciate how the actor comically rants about here. His home life is almost disastrous, with a ditzy (but attractive) wife, three young children, a loud school nearby that’s controlled by a corrupt businessman he loathes, and frequent visits from layabout friends. And the grey-furred, green-eyed cat!

When a lucrative waterfront development becomes available, the Kawade gang quickly use their political connections to secure the land. However, the acting boss of the Ohara gang also has his eyes on the property and recruits crooked detective Tokumatsu Kuno to help him hijack the deal. With relations between the rival gangs at breaking point, it's not long before all-out war breaks out as the gangsters, police and local politicians battle for control of the city.

A woman and her bridegroom are found murdered in their bed the day after their wedding. It had snowed overnight and the killer left no tracks. It is up to an amateur detective to figure out what happened. Carefully and systematically, he pieces together the clues in this locked room mystery.

When both a priceless jewel and the daughter of a rich heiress are stolen by a master criminal, Koga and his gang are hired to retrieve both. But a double-cross leads to a risky high-security bank heist and loads of martial arts mayhem.

The seventh in the shocking "Jingi Naki Tatakai" movie series, which exposes the true lives of the yakuza that is hidden by a mask of "jingi". The next stage of this continuing drama is the Kanmon Channel where the Owada and the Kyoei groups are battling for territorial rights and drug smuggling. The Owada sends their man, Tetsu, and his friend Shuji to kill the Kyoei boss. With the promise of fame and riches, Shuji takes the fall and goes to jail for 7 years. But when he's released, he discovers that he and Tetsu have been all but forgotten by the Owada. Feeling betrayed, Shuji takes matters into his own hands and becomes an unsuspecting pawn in an internal conflict and an assassination attempt on the Owada boss. And now angered, Shuji seeks revenge...

A horrifying series of murders, committed by a teenaged killer in 1968, prompted a group of filmmakers to chart his path, capturing the things he might have seen before committing his crimes. Their result is this provocative, rarely-screened meditation on geography and society. In 1969, Adachi, who had already made a number of important films, led a group of people, who were all in the vanguard of filmmaking in Japan, in making a film called “AKA. Serial Killer.” The camera eye mostly shows various landscapes across Japan, following the itinerary of a young informal worker, Norio Nagayama, who ended up committing a series of shootings in these places. Then a relatively known film director made a narrative film about Nagayama’s miserable upbringing and tried to make a statement about the social inequality that was supposed to have been responsible for his crime (The film is “Naked Nineteen -Hadaka no Jyuukyuu-sai-” directed by Kaneto Shindo, 1970). Meanwhile this group decided to pursue a totally different approach, which, precisely speaking, is neither a story film nor documentary. It is an attempt to see exactly what Nagayama saw along his itinerary looking for a better job, a better place, which never existed. The resulting film shows a series of terrains that have been transformed to the effect of losing genius loci or the singularities of place and became a series of postcard-like landscapes. This was the most straightforward critique of capital’s “real subsumption,” namely, the overall commodification of the everyday, which corresponds to the critique of “spectacle” by Guy Debord (The key word used in the debate provoked by the film was fukei in Japanese, which is commonly translated as “landscape.” As opposed to that, the music critic Yuzo Sakuramoto suggested to use “spectacle.”). 足立正生 Masao Adachi 男，生于1939年5月13日，福冈 他为大岛渚和若松孝二写下了不少杰出的剧本。 当他还是大学生的时候，他来到了若松的制片公司，要求加入，若松说：欢迎，我会好好折磨你的。足立写剧本很快，两天一个。后来若松回忆起来，说当时的确对他很狠，甚至说：如果下雨，就是你的错。 1971年，足立加入日本赤军，成为领袖之一，后来转战中东，1997年2月15日被黎巴嫩警方逮捕。2000年3月18日被黎巴嫩政府送回日本，在成田机场，足立被日本警方逮捕。

1974 film by Kei Kumai

Two detectives are tasked to investigate the murder of an old man, found bludgeoned to death in a Tokyo rail yard.

Set in the post-World War II climate of the 1960s in Kobe, the movie explores the struggle for power within the powerful Manpyo family.