Movies: Nagisa Ōshima

A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship....

In a small Japanese village at the end of the 19th century, a rickshaw driver's wife takes on a much younger lover and the two conspire to murder him....

Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path....

Island of Java, 1942, during World War II. British Major Jack Celliers arrives at a Japanese prison camp, run by the strict Captain Yonoi. Colonel John Lawrence, who has a profound knowledge of Japanese culture, and Sergeant Hara, brutal and simpleto...

Set during Japan's Shogun era, this film looks at life in a samurai compound where young warriors are trained in swordfighting. A number of interpersonal conflicts are brewing in the training room, all centering around a handsome young samurai named ...

Screen icon Charlotte Rampling has fascinated the world of cinema, fashion and photography with her mysterious and almost inaccessible beauty. A major figure in genre and auteur films, she is unclassifiable: between presence and absence, shyness and ...

In Osaka's slum, youths without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin's g...

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next....

A police investigator cracks down on yakuza business, but once he realizes the police are in negotiations with certain factions, he sides with his own syndicate of choice....

Two young women must come to terms with the fact that a man they're deeply linked to is a murdering rapist....

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each...

Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades....

A budding gangster enthralls a freeloading young woman, soon taking advantage of her knack for hitch-hiking to rob middle-class, middle-aged men....

A corrupt businessman blackmails the lovelorn reprobate Atsushi into watching over his suitcase full of embezzled cash while he serves a jail sentence....

A young man runs a scam selling pigeons that always return to his home. He falls under the wing of Kyoko, an older student whose heart is touched after Masuo sells his pigeons to her. However, after his scam is revealed, can these feelings truly rema...

A sex-obsessed woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, and a gun-crazy wannabe gangster become trapped in an underground hideaway....

A metaphysical mystery involving a university student's camera getting stolen, and the thief then committing suicide....

Towards the end of the Second World War, a downed U.S. pilot is captured and imprisoned by rural Japanese villagers, who await official instructions as to how to proceed with their “catch.”...

14-year-old Sunaoko travels from Tokyo to Naha, Okinawa, with her father’s young fiancée Momoko in search of her half-brother whom she has never met. Their guide, a beer-guzzling ex-soldier, takes them to the locale’s tourist attractions, quickly del...

A young boy joins a band of ninja during a peasant uprising, all depicted through an experimental form of filming pages from the original manga set to sound....