Shōchiku Kabushiki Kaisha

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, it is a piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship of a childless, middle-aged couple, as the wife's city-bred sophistication bumps up against the husband's small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change, in the form of their headstrong, modern niece, sweeps over their household....

July 1945. As the Pacific War was in its final stages, the Allies demanded the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration* by Japan, which had lost any hope of winning the war. Surrender or fight the Decisive War at home? The cabinet debates day and night, but the controversy only escalates. In the face of Japan's silence, the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the final blows, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. An imperial meeting...

In four late-nineteenth-century Shanghai "flower houses", courtesans live confined to opulent splendor but are forced to work to buy back their freedom, and romantic intrigue, jealousies and tensions roil around their assignations.

A widowed father forces his adult daughter to begin her own life by fooling her into believing he will remarry.

Walk cheerfully: Small-time hood Kenji, a.k.a. Ken the Knife, wants to go straight for good girl Yasue but finds that starting over isn't as simple as it sounds. That night's wife: In noirish darkness, a man commits a shocking robbery. But, this seeming criminal mastermind is actually a sensitive everyman driven to desperation by the need to provide for his family. Dragnet girl: This gangster tale pivots on the growing attraction between Joji, a...

Port of flowers: The sweet but naive denizens of a charming port town are hoodwinked by a couple of con men at the outset of World War II. But the hustlers' plan backfires when they come down with severe cases of conscience. The living Magoroku: A superstitious farming family is hesitant to use its fields to grow crops to help feed the nation's troops. Jubilation Street: As World War II escalates, the tight-knit inhabitants of a street in Tokyo...

This heartrending masterpiece by Kenji Mizoguchi about the give-and-take between life and art marked the director's first use of the hypnotic long takes and eloquent camera movements that would come to define his films. The adopted son of legendary kabuki actor Kikunosuke, who is striving to achieve stardom by mastering female roles, turns to his infant brother's wet nurse for support and affection, and she soon gives up everything for her beloved's...

Following years of a certain radioactive beast's domination at the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating, if short-lived, dives into that fiendish deep end was the one by Shochiku, a studio better known for elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies,...

Flunky, work hard: Mikio Naruse's earliest available film, Flunky, work hard is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son. No blood relation: A gripping early example of Mikio Naruse's cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu's famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood...

Early spring: A young salaryman in postwar Japan, dissatisfied with career and marriage, begins an affair with a flirtatious co-worker. Tokyo twilight: Follows the parallel paths of two sisters contending with an absent mother, unwanted pregnancy, and marital discord. Equinox flower: A stubborn businessman who disapproves of his daughter's fiancé must learn to embrace modern romance. Late autumn: A widow tries to marry off her daughter with the...