Tatsuya Nakadai

Tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage.

A botched kidnapping of a Japanese executive's son turns into a race-against-time.

Ryunosuke is a sociopathic samurai. When he is scheduled for an exhibition match at his fencing school, the wife of his opponent begs Ryunosuke to throw the match, offering her own virtue in trade.

After an unemployed samurai is forced to commit harakiri before a feudal lord, his father-in-law returns to the scene, seemingly to play out the same agonizing suicide ritual.

A complex crime thriller in which a wealthy Japanese shoe manufacturer's chauffeur's son is kidnapped in mistake for his own, and he faces a moral dilemma.

A group of young men set out to clean up the corruption in their town. They are joined by a scruffy, cynical samurai who doesn't fit their concept of how a warrior should look and act.

The thick-walled room. Among the first Japanese films to deal directly with the scars of World War II, this drama about a group of rank-and file Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity was adapted by Abe Kōbō from the diaries of real prisoners. I will buy you. Masaki Kobayashi's pitiless take on Japan's professional baseball industry is unlike any other sports film ever made. A condemnation of the inhumanity bred by a mercenary, bribery-fueled...

After more than a decade of sober political dramas and social-minded period pieces, 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...

The colossally popular Zatoichi films make up the longest-running action series in Japanese history and created one of the screen's great heroes: an itinerant blind masseur who also happens to be a lightning-fast swordsman. Features the string of twenty-five Zatoichi films made between 1962 and 1973, starring Shintaro Katsu, collected in one package for the first time.