Movies: Asao Uchida

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughte...

In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words used by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised th...

After surviving the slaughter of many Christians 350 years ago, a samurai denounces God for ignoring the pleas of believers. He sells his soul to Satan and receives the power to resurrect the dead to join him in a murderous rampage....

Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead ...

In this first film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, adapted from the manga by Kazuo Koike, we are told the story of the Lone Wolf and Cub's origin. Ogami Itto, the official Shogunate executioner, has been framed for disloyalty to the Shogunate by the...

In the fourth film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Ogami Itto is hired to kill a tattooed female assassin and battles Retsudo, head of the Yagyu clan, and his son Gunbei....

The culturally isolated, nomadic Seburi people of western Japan are the subject of this tragedy about a few of the community's members who especially experience difficulties as modern Japan encroaches on their world. The setting is World War II, and ...

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza....

Back after four years, Goro learns his younger brother's been thrown out of the gang and his girlfriend's married another man. It's payback time....

As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic games, the cops start to crack down on the gangs, under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima....

A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims....

Set up to be the patsy by a rival gang, Furuta Makoto attacks the yakuza boss he thinks is responsible for his father’s murder. He then learns it was all a plot to take over his father’s turf and he seeks vengeance against the puppet master behind th...

A gang lord hires Kamimura, a hit man, to take out a rival boss who's gotten greedy....

Romantic action film set against the beautiful backdrop of Rio de Janeiro. Jiro Ibuki has decided to leave the world of the yakuza and live with his fiancée Reiko....

A former stockbroker-turned-yakuza must make sure his alcoholic boss is up to the task of swearing in the next leader of their syndicate....

The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress from his youth....

Ken Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda). Realizing th...

The first movie of Tôru Murakawa’s “Game” trilogy, in which an assassin hired to recover a kidnap victim becomes embroiled in a vicious power struggle between two large corporations over a sizable government defence contract....

A model gets involved with some gangsters trying to pull a big deal....

A ship is attacked at sea for its cargo by a group of thieves who murder a newlywed doctor and rape his wife. Three years later her twin sister is kidnapped by the same pirates, who begin to die strange deaths......