"Master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu directed fifty-three feature films over the course of his long career. Yet it was in the final decade of his life, his "old master" phase, that he entered his artistic prime. Centered more than ever on the modern sensibilities of the younger generation, these delicate family dramas are marked by an exquisite formal elegance and emotional sensitivity about birth and death, love and marriage, and all the accompanying joys...

This haunting, kabuki-inflected version of a Japanese folk legend is set in a remote mountain village, where food is scarce and tradition dictates that citizens who have reached their seventieth year must be carried to the summit of Mount Narayama and left there to die. The sacrificial elder at the center of the tale is Orin, a dignified and dutiful woman who spends her dwindling days securing the happiness of her loyal widowed son with a respectable...

A giant talking frog and an elusive cat help a listless bank employee, his traumatized wife, and a lonely accountant seek meaning in their lives and possibly save Tokyo from catastrophe in this animated feature based on stories by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The feature debut of composer Pierre Foldes, the film won the Jury Special Mention at the renowned Annecy Animation Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Anima Festival in Brussels....

Yoko, a freelance writer, becomes pregnant and chooses, against tradition and her parents' wishes, to raise the baby alone. In her loneliness and confusion, Yoko befriends the owner of a second-hand bookstore, who silently falls in love with her as she contemplates the choice she has made.

After more than a decade of sober political dramas and social-minded periodpieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories. Featuring colorfully surreal sets and luminous cinematography, these haunting tales of demonic comeuppance and spiritual trials, adapted from writer Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folklore, are existentially frightening and meticulously...

"It's death, Japanese style, in the rollicking and wistful first feature from maverick writer-director Juzo Itami. In the wake of her lascivious father's sudden passing, a successful actor (Itami's wife and frequent collaborator, Nobuko Miyamoto) and her husband (Tsutomu Yamazaki) leave Tokyo and return to their family house to oversee a traditional funeral. Over the course of three days of mourning that bring illicit escapades in the woods, a surprisingly...

A gently heartbreaking story about a man's dignifed resignation to life's shifting currents and society's modernization. Though widower Shuhei has been living comfortably for years with his grown daughter, a series of events leads him to accept and encourage her marriage and departure from their home.

Portrays 45 years in the life of a woman, from her country childhood through the years as a ruthless Tokyo madam and back to her native village.

Portrays postwar Japan through the power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka, where there are American soldiers based.