Beautiful Noriko Miki works at a cosmetic company. One day, Noriko is murdered. People begin to suspect her co-worker Miki Shirono might have killed her. Television begins to cover her story. A TV show interviews Miki Shirono's colleagues, family, people from her hometown. Rumors turn into fear. Is she a wicked a woman?
Five years apart, they reunite as lovers, but when family-demands force Xiao Chen to marry, Lu Feng feels betrayed—and vows revenge.
A 7 year love story between Ryota Hayama and Koharu Uemura from their first date to eventual marriage. Ryota and Koharu are high school students. Ryota is indifferent to people and says very little. Koharu is not afraid of to speak her mind and she has a bright personality. Since a game of rice bag jump, they begin to date. They date at a fast-food restaurant, realize they love each other at a family restaurant and finally swear their love on a dining table with white rice.
37 year old sales manager Iwatsu is so caught up in work, he's unable to truly live his life. One night while looking at his graduation album on his phone, he receives a sudden call from a girl named Kana. He's taken to his hometown Kobe, where he lived as a teenager. Slowly, by way of Kana, Iwatsu's past is resuscitated.
Britain is in crisis. An ineffectual Queen Cymbeline rules over a divided dystopian Britain. Consumed with grief at the death of two of her children, Cymbeline's judgment is clouded. When Innogen, the only living heir, marries her sweetheart Posthumus in secret, an enraged Cymbeline banishes him. Behind the throne, a power-hungry figure plots to seize power by murdering them both. In exile Innogen's husband is tricked into believing she has been unfaithful to him and in an act of impulsive jealousy begins a scheme to have her murdered. Warned of the danger, Innogen runs away from court in disguise and begins a journey fraught with danger that will eventually reunite Cymbeline with a long-lost heir and reconcile the young lovers.
Ai's mother sends her to live with a cult commune, where she remains for seven years. After the cult is broken up by the police, Ai struggles to fit in with society.
Kondo Isami, the “Devil” commander of the Shinsengumi was one of Japan’s greatest national heroes and a peerless swordsman who devoted his life to protecting the shogun and fighting on the side of the Tokugawa. This tells the story of the Shinsengumi starting at the moment of their greatest triumph through the final battles as the Tokugawa shogunate was brought down.
Young girl Saori, a cook at a diner, loves cooking. There is a regular customer Kujo, a guy who has never touched the plate of her cooking. Saori decides to give him a bag of sandwiches for him to eat at home, but later she finds that he gave it to a Buddhist monk on a street. She does not know that Kujo only eats what he cooked himself. A tragicomedy of 4 couples suffering about eating.
Seven years ago, Max’s parents died in a car accident. Since then, the young man, now 35, has been treading water. He manages his father’s hockey memorabilia shop, lives in the apartment upstairs, and watches each and every Habs game with his friends. But he’s forced to take a hard look at his life when his girlfriend, Julie, leaves him, and his sister, Nathalie, comes back to town.
Kii, a young woman who isn't good at studying or sports, finds her passion in life through amateur photography. While trying to take a good shot one afternoon, she meets fledgling singer Yuu by chance and together they move towards the light of accomplishing their dreams.
A Latvian tragicomedy about a young artist who bears witness to the dramatic political upheavals of the WWII era. As brutal regimes come and go, his country, his village, his people, and even his heart are swept up in the inexorable currents of history.
Marjatta lives in poor conditions in Tampere with her widowed father Arttu who works as a factory worker. Marjatta gets to know engineering student Pauli whose constantly worsening mental health problems and jealousy become a threat to Marjatta and her close circle.
On a rainy night, eccentric tramp Mr. La Souris finds a corpse. But the body soon vanishes in his car leaving only his wallet. While the police start investigating a missing person report, La Souris concocts a plan to secure his find.
Blind swordsman/masseuse Zatoichi befriends a young woman looking for her father, a village leader who has disappeared. As he helps her investigate the disappearance, Zatoichi also becomes involved with another young woman who is trying to help her brother, who has murdered someone at about the same time and place as the missing man was last seen.
Itinerant masseur and master swordsman, the blind Zatoichi, is near the village of his teacher, Hikonoichi, so he decides to visit. He learns of Hikonoichi's recent robbery and murder and the imprisonment of his virginal daughter, Osayo, in a brothel. Through friendship with Denroku, a local dice thrower and devoted father, Ichi uncovers an unholy alliance between the governor and the area strongman: among their scams is falsifying tax records to put farmers in debt, then forcing their daughters into prostitution at the boss's brothel. With help from Denroku's daughter, Otsuru, Ichi comforts Osayo until he can provoke showdowns with the villains and their henchmen.
Blind swordsman Zatoichi, jailed briefly, is implored by another prisoner to aid him in proving his innocence of a crime for which he is sentenced to death. Zatoichi is reluctant to get involved, because he knows how often such involvement has led to trouble in the past. But events conspire to thrust him repeatedly into involvement, and gradually he comes to believe in the man's innocence and determines to free him.
In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.
Akira Kurosawa's lauded feudal epic presents the tale of a petty thief who is recruited to impersonate Shingen, an aging warlord, in order to avoid attacks by competing clans. When Shingen dies, his generals reluctantly agree to have the impostor take over as the powerful ruler. He soon begins to appreciate life as Shingen, but his commitment to the role is tested when he must lead his troops into battle against the forces of a rival warlord.
Residents of a rundown boardinghouse in 19th-century Japan, including a mysterious old man and an aging actor, get drawn into a love triangle that turns violent. When amoral thief Sutekichi breaks off his affair with landlady Osugi to romance her younger sister, Okayo, Osugi extracts her revenge by revealing her infidelity to her jealous husband.
After handing in a report on the treatment of Chinese colonial labor, Kaji is offered the post of labor chief at a large mining operation in Manchuria, which also grants him exemption from military service. He accepts, and moves to Manchuria with his newly-wed wife Michiko, but when he tries to put his ideas of more humane treatment into practice, he finds himself at odds with scheming officials, cruel foremen, and the military police.
Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Kurosawa's tightly paced, beautifully composed "Sanjuro." In this companion piece and sequel to "Yojimbo," jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a proper samurai on its ear.
A pickup artist/womanizer named Patrick inadvertently pursues two young women who happen to be roommates.
Yoshitsune Minamoto, disguised with his retinue as monks, must make do with a comical porter as their guide through hostile territory en route to safety.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
The background to and depiction of a watershed battle in Japanese history, at Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu's Army of the East defeated the Army of the West of Ishida Mitsunari. The story includes the intrigues and shifting loyalties of the various retainers, family members, and samurai.
For 17 years, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt filmed his daughter Ella on her birthday in the same spot, asking her the same questions. In just 29 minutes, we watch her grow from a toddler to a young woman with all the beautiful and sometimes awkward stages in between. Each phase is captured fleetingly but makes an indelible mark. Her responses to her father’s questions are just a backdrop for a deeper story of parental love, acceptance, and ultimately, independence.
Zatoichi is sworn to protect the life of a young girl and without any real allies finds himself in the middle of a bloody turf war.
Manchester, the present. Michael divides his time between the job center and the pub. A chance meeting with Lee, an introduction to her Uncle Ian and a heavy night on the lash lead to a job working the door at a Northern Quarter massage parlor. After witnessing the violent death of one of the punters, Michael experiences blood-drenched flashbacks and feels himself being sucked into a twilight world that he doesn't understand but that is irresistibly attractive. When he eventually finds out what goes on in the room below Cloud 9, Michaels' life will never be the same again.
During Japan's invasion of the Philippines in 1942, Capt. Henry Lassiter, Sgt. Bill Dane and a diverse group of American soldiers are ordered to destroy and hold a strategic bridge in order to delay the Japanese forces and allow Gen. MacArthur time to secure Bataan. When the Japanese soldiers begin to rebuild the bridge and advance, the group struggles with not only hunger, sickness and gunfire, but also the knowledge that there is likely no relief on the way.
Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue comes at a cost. Blind musician Hoichi is forced to perform for an audience of ghosts. An author relates the story of a samurai who sees another warrior's reflection in his teacup.
Two farmhands compete for the love of the farmer's daughter.
Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One job is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick decides that the only way to get out of their economic woes is to declare war on the United States, lose and accept foreign aid. They send an invasion force (in chain mail, armed with bows and arrows) to New York and they arrive during a nuclear drill that has cleared the streets.
Ten-year-old Johnny stands out from his family and his tough neighborhood in Eastern France. He's sensitive, intelligent and interested in all kinds of things way beyond his years. With curiosity, he observes the ups and downs of his young single mother's turbulent love life. Things change when a new teacher, fresh from the big city, takes over Johnny's class. Mr. Adamski believes in Johnny and wants to open a new world to him. The sophisticated young teacher also intrigues the boy.