Movies: Zenji Yamada

When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence....

Second part of an epic drama of war and its effects upon human beings, follows the fortunes of the Godai family from 1935 through Japan's invasion of China. Based on the novels by Jumpei Gomikawa, who also penned The Human Condition....

An expedition in the South Pacific lands on a tropical island where the natives worship the mysterious deity Gappa. An earthquake opens up an underground cavern and a baby reptile is discovered inside. The natives warn the foreigners to leave the hat...

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking....

The eldest daughter of a rural family Mon returns home from Tokyo pregnant after an affair with a college student Kobata, which causes a scandal that will threaten the marriage prospects of the younger sister San, in her cash-strapped family. The ill...

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

Businessmen arrange the early release from prison of Togawa, serving time for taking revenge on the truck driver whose carelessness confined Togawa's sister, Rie, to a wheelchair. They want Togawa to hijack an armored truck loaded with 120 million ye...

Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for ...

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of...

One day, a lone horseman rides into town with a wounded man strapped behind him. Joe, the Ace, had captured one of the bandits who had held up the armored payroll car headed for the dam construction site, takes the wounded man to the police and claim...

A narrative depicting the appearance of soldiers scattered in Rabaul during the Pacific War. The original work of Yoshinori Matsuura was dramatized by Toyama Tetsu of “Smuggling of the Body”, also directed by Yutaka Abe, and Shigeyoshi Mine of “Densu...

Japanese crime film...

A bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers....

Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidatio...

Mataemon Araki, a renowned swordsman, helps a young man find vengeance....

Shinko Terasawa was always considered to be the odd ball of the bunch. At a time when romance was against school regulations, Shinko was the first to take a bite out of the forbidden fruit. Expelled from her former school, she finds herself in an all...

In the dying months of the Meiji era, a sympathetic student befriends a married couple, but soon realizes they share a curiously strained relationship stemming from an unknown incident in their past....

A young boss proves his right to rule his gang....

Shortly after arriving in Kobe, "Jiro the Lefty", a killer with a natural talent, witnesses a man die in a crane accident which turns out to be a cover-up for a murder. Jiro soon finds himself on the run, tailed by a determined cop....

The moment he's released from prison, the honorable gangster Miyamoto recovers the stolen diamonds he had stashed before getting pinched. When he returns to his haunt to make good by friend who took a bullet for him, he is diverted by the greedy boss...