Movies: Kaneto Shindō

In Edo-period Japan, Shingo is born the son of an assassin who was executed for murdering her lord’s concubine. Decades later, his adoptive family is massacred for keeping the secret. Armed with an unbeatable swordfighting technique, Shingo embarks o...

First film of a trilogy following the dramatic life of Rika, a half-Japanese/half-American woman who becomes the tough-as-nails leader of an all-girl crime gang....

Based on the original novel by Tokuda Shusei, adapted by frequent Masumura scribe Kaneto Shindo, this downbeat melodrama features a battle of women for the affections and commitment of the same man, a handsome car salesman. Masuko is the number one h...

Rica wanting a fresh start leaves her friends and past life behind or at least that is what she thinks as trouble always seems to find her. Rica's looks into a ship that exploded and everyone who survived this disaster who comes in contact with her d...

A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many...

A fishing village is terrorized by a giant whale, and the fishermen are determined to kill it....

Michio Yamada, a recent school graduate, is sent to Tokyo to work as a fruit-packer in a department store as part of a government programme. He takes a gun from a house on an American base and uses it to kill several people. The scene changes to Yam...

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century, small-town girl Okane has married an old wealthy man to escape a life of poverty....

Reform schools are a way of protecting society by ridding it of lawless juvenile delinquents. But who's protecting the juvenile delinquents from corrupt reform schools? Rica could be considered a bit of an expert on reform schools, having spent most ...

The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out....

The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on ...

Haru, an aging scriptwriter, has isolated himself somewhere in the woods of Nagano to work on his first novel. As the last surviving member of his kin, he intends to chronicle the family he grew up in....

It is based on the story of The Ballad of Narayama updated to the present day, with the substitution of putting a parent into an old people's home for the abandonment of the original. The film won the Golden St. George and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2...

The body of Sakai Hatsuko, a woman of 23 who has been slain with a knife, has been found in a forest. Some days later, Ueda Hiroshi, a 19-year-old shipyard worker, is arrested and charged with the murder. At Ueda's trial, a complex story unfolds....

The story of a certain engineer from his youth until he retired from the Japanese National Railways after the war ....

A young Japanese-American man arrives at his grandmother's old hometown in Yamaguchi, begins to stay at her family's elite but dysfunctional household, and gets entangled in a sinister plot of murder....

Ebihara is a budding novelist entangled in a complicated web of relationships with three women from three different generations: Kazue, a coquettish teenage war orphan who tries to offer herself for money but is instead taken in by Ebihara, Koyabu, a...

Hideo is sold in marriage to a Japanese farmer in San Francisco to settle her family's debt. Over the next 20 years, the couple works hard and raises 4 children. After Pearl Harbor is attacked, they are interned with other Japanese immigrants in a ca...

A large earthquake hits Tokyo, which was predicted by a seismologist but was ignored....

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 18th-century epistolary novel 'Les Liaisons dangereuses' is adapted to a contemporary setting. An abominable and burning jealousy and an evil relationship between a man and a woman unfold in the nature of a game. Eventuall...