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...

In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent film: A Story of Floating Weeds in color and sound with the cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Ugetsu). Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunities with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in...

Fashioned as a tribute to his parents, the film depicts one day in the life of the Yokoyamas, gathered together for a celebratory ritual that only gradually makes itself clear. Rather than focus on big dramatic moments, Kore-eda relies on simple gestures and domestic routines (especially cooking) to evoke a family's entire life, its deep regrets and its daily joys.

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....

No regrets for our youth. Yukie, the spoiled bourgeois daughter of a university professor, begins a soul-searching journey that takes her from the elegance of Kyoto to the peasant farms of impoverished rural Japan, the rise and fall of ultranationalism corresponding with her own moral awakening. One wonderful Sunday. Yuzo and Masako, a middle-class couple suffering from economic postwar decline, meet on Sunday in Tokyo with only thirty-five yen to...

The ballad of Narayama: Depicts the members of an extended farming family eking out their existence in the mountainous north of Japan against the backdrop of the changing seasons before village lore decrees they make the sacrifice of abandoning their aged mother on the top of a nearby mountain when she reaches her seventieth year. Zegen: Takes a satirical look at Japan's prewar colonial expansion through the unscrupulous eyes of its flesh-peddler...