Japanese Cinema

Mikio Naruse’s masterpiece about a wandering woman trying to find her identity amid the devastation of post-war Japan.

Koreeda's lyrical fantasy challenges the viewer to reflect on the experiences that most make life worth living.

Credited with bringing Japanese cinema to worldwide audiences, Akira Kurosawa’s breakthrough tells the story of a murder in the woods from four differing perspectives.

Akira Kurosawa’s procedural crime masterpiece follows an industrialist who faces an agonising choice.

Mikio Naruse’s best-known film is a masterful study of a Ginza hostess struggling under constant pressures to compromise her honour.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to Drive My Car is a hauntingly enigmatic eco-thriller. Winner of Best Film at the BFI London Film Festival.

A bureaucrat’s life finds new meaning in Kurosawa’s classic original, the source for Bill Nighy’s brilliant drama, Living.

Yasujiro Ozu's elegiac final film charts the inevitable eclipse of older generations by irreverent youth.

Teruo Ishii's landmark ‘ero-guro’ film tells three stories of moral sickness set during Japan’s prosperous Genroku era.

A young baseball player becomes mixed up with a psychotic yakuza, in Takeshi Kitano's hilarious and twisted crime tale.

Comedy turns to pathos in Yasujiro Ozu's tale of a group of businessmen who conspire to match-make for a widow and her daughter.

The first film made by Akira Kurosawa's own production company is a dark tale of greed, corporate corruption and revenge.

In this bizarre erotic family drama, a young widow pretends to be a cow for her senile father-in-law, who's a farmer.

A master of period-drama, Kurosawa (Rashomon, Seven Samurai) recasts Macbeth as a Japanese warlord in one of the greatest Shakespearean adaptations

Koreeda’s subtle, moving account of the tensions within a family is his most Ozu-like film.

Farmers hire a band of samurai to defend them against marauding bandits in Kurosawa’s influential epic, a touchstone for action movies ever since.

Koreeda’s drama about four children left to fend for themselves is a heartbreaking study of childhood neglect.

This stunningly beautiful anthology of Japanese ghost stories is one of the most meticulously crafted supernatural films ever made.

Not all is as it seems in Hirokazu Koreeda’s powerful drama told from shifting perspectives.

A fixture in critics' polls, Yasujirō Ozu's most enduring masterpiece is a beautifully nuanced exploration of filial duty, expectation and regret.

Shoji (Ryu Ikebe) and his wife Masako (Chikage Awashima), struggle with a family tragedy. When Shoji's interest turns to the office flirt, the couple's fragile peace is threatened.

Yasujiro Ozu's cheerful comedy about the silliness of everyday chatter.

Yasujiro Ozu's influential masterpiece is a tender meditation on family politics, sacrifice and the status quo.

Mamoru Oshii's beautifully animated and disturbingly prophetic anime classic about the hunt for a supreme hacker in a transhumanist dystopia.

The on and off-screen character of Toshiro Mifune, Japan’s first international movie star, is explored in this illuminating documentary exploring the life and legacy of this mercurial icon.

Kurosawa’s classic about a drifting samurai who plays two gangs off against each other, famously remade as A Fistful of Dollars.

In Akira Kurosawa's comedy, a ronin runs rings around nine young samurai while cleaning up a spot of corruption in local government.

Part gangster film, part melodrama and part social critique, Akira Kurosawa's first critical success follows the troubled friendship between a disillusioned doctor and a young yakuza.

Kurosawa’s episodic, poignant story of a 19th-century doctor (Toshiro Mifune) working in a clinic for the poor and his tumultuous friendship with a young intern.

Akira Kurosawa’s masterful mix of film noir and police thriller set on the sweltering mean streets of occupied Tokyo.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's mystifying, serene and provocative fable about an entomologist who becomes trapped in a young widow’s desert shack.

Koreeda’s first fiction feature is an exquisite meditation on loss, loneliness, uncertainty, and coming to terms with the past.

Kurosawa’s assured debut film about a young man’s spiritual journey through the study and practice of judo.

Bizarre and unsettling sex fantasy from Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo), about a woman blackmailed by a stranger into enacting his wildest fantasies.

Ozu's deft comedy takes an ironic look at the decline of paternal authority.

Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling mix of fairy story and samurai movie - a story of rival clans, hidden gold and a princess in distress - was famously a key inspiration for George Lucas’ Star Wars.

Takeshi Kitano's masterful and meditative gangster film, about a yakuza sent to the beautiful beaches of Okinawa where he has time to ruminate on his fate.

In his brutal directorial debut, ‘Beat' Takeshi Kitano plays a renegade cop who frequently resorts to violence and unethical methods to get results.