Movies: Japanese noir

Two escaped criminals who kidnapped a baby break into the house of Misawa, a man who works in an advertising agency and lives quietly with his family. They will force him to collect the child's ransom for them....

Two young crooks who scam betters in the race track are employed by a yakuza gang called the Shigemori Syndicate to steal a shipment of handguns from a rival gang. Somewhere in the process they find themselves on the run from their own gang and one o...

Before leaving prison, Oida uncomfortably enters into an agreement with his cell mate: in exchange for a half-share of 30,000,000 yen, he is to assassinate three strangers given to him on a list. However, upon meeting his first potential victim, Oida...

Udaka is a new, post-war city where corruption has already taken hold. A persistent district attorney wants to arrest and convict Katsumata, a laughing, self-confident thug. The D.A. gets an anonymous letter about the suicide five years' before of a ...

After yakuza boss Kurata dissolves his own criminal empire, a rival kingpin offers a position to Kurata's top operative, Tetsuya "Phoenix Tetsu" Hondo. When the fiercely loyal Tetsu declines, Otsuka taps unstoppable Tatsuzo the "Viper", a ruthless gu...

A top police-guard, charged with protecting a visiting politician and ruthless dictator, contends with an assassin set to kill the man....

Raizô Ichikawa reprises his role as the restaurant-cook-turned-contract-killer in this sequel to Kazuo Mori's stylish 1967 thriller A Certain Killer....

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...

When 150 guns are stolen from Iwakuni base and two police officers are shot dead, a detective criminal tries to find out the truth....

Freelance reporter “Scoop” Machida is hot on the trail of a prostitution ring called the Black Line, when he is framed for the murder of a young woman. Forced to clear his own name, the handsome journalist sinks deeper into the Black Line’s rotten s...

A noir action whodunit with Kobayashi his usual jaunty self as the smart aleck private eye whose missing person search soon becomes a murder case. Nightclub-managing, drug-dealing gangster Uchida is the prime suspect in the case until he commits suic...

Kaze is a philandering TV producer. His wife and nine of his mistresses conspire to kill him. However each woman would rather keep him alive, as long as she was the only woman in his life....

When a married man begins an affair with a woman from his past, he comes to suspect her young son intends to murder him....

A juvenile delinquent gets out of the pen and immediately embarks on a rampage of untethered anger, most of it directed at the girlfriend of the journalist who helped send him up....

After a successful robbery the culprits, from very different backgrounds, at once turn on each other....

It tells the story of a couple who fall into a trap set up by a sinister organization. One of them is a guy who is framed for the murder of his lover. The other is a woman pick-pocket who is entrapped by the organization's schemes involving their cri...

Yoshida's first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a "good-for-nothing" from a poor background falls in love with the young secretary of his rich friend's father...

Gang of robbers quarrel about the loot, but when one of them gets killed, his younger brother seeks them out to ice them one by one....

Sabu and his pals hold a pauper's funeral for Sabu's mother. His brother Jiro arrives home, fresh out of jail, and Sabu pointedly states that Jiro is not invited. Jiro meanwhile is planning a big job - steal 40 million in cash and drugs, and he invit...

Suspense drama about a married salaryman whose affair with one of his co-workers is compromised when, returning from a clandestine meeting with his lover, he runs into a neighbor who is later accused of murder. Questioned by police about the neighbor...