Noriko Honma

Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, "Rashomon" is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four ...  (more)

A collection of magical tales based upon the actual dreams of director Akira Kurosawa.  (more)

Searching for his brother, Ryota stows away on a boat belonging to a criminal alongside two other teenagers. The group shipwrecks on Letchi island and discover the Infant Island natives have been enslaved by a terrorist organization controlling a crustacean monster ...  (more)

Kiichi Nakajima, an elderly foundry owner, is convinced that Japan will be affected by an imminent nuclear war, and resolves to move his family to safety in Brazil. His family decides to have him ruled incompetent and Dr. Harada, a Domestic Court counselor, ...  (more)

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.  (more)

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.  (more)

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves ...  (more)

The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, whose husband was one of 80,000 human beings killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to ...  (more)

A humble and simple Takezo abandons his life as a knight errant. He's sought as a teacher and vassal by Shogun, Japan's most powerful clan leader. He's also challenged to fight by the supremely confident and skillful Sasaki Kojiro. Takezo agrees to fight Kojiro in ...  (more)

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. ...  (more)

A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.  (more)

In an effort to find an economic means of purifying salt water, a joint U.S.-Japanese military command is set up on an isolated Japanese island where an unusual salt water lake is situated. However, their purifying experiments arouse the prehistoric monster Obaki ...  (more)

A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin convinces both silk merchant Tazaemon and sake ...  (more)

Gosho’s most celebrated film both in Japan and the West, Where Chimneys Are Seen is perhaps the most compelling example of his concern for, and insights into, the everyday lives of lower-middle-class people. Based on Rinzo Shiina’s novel of the absurd, the film ...  (more)

Lonely youth Shinji meets Hatsue, a pretty pearl diver, on the beach and the two fall in love. But Shinji has a rival for Hatsue's affections, Yasuo.  (more)

Based on an autobiographical story by Toyota Masako.  (more)

A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband's co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.  (more)

The Whole Family Works, Mikio Naruse's adaptation of a Sunao Tokunaga novel, feels more of a piece with the writer/director's quietly observant and psychologically charged later work. For the Naruse-familiar, it is an anomaly only in its placement within his ...  (more)

A skilled country doctor's talents are such that he can even perform operations as difficult and novel as removing a patient's kidney for the first time in Japan. Unfortunately for him, however, his wife's addiction to gambling is of such a magnitude that he is ...  (more)

Toku, a factory worker gives food to a starving woman, Tsuru, who then follows him home. He shares a shack in a shanty village in Kawasaki with his friend Pin-chan. The two men try to get rid of her but then let her stay when she gives them money. Tsuru tells the ...  (more)