Movies: Toru Takemitsu

When a prostitute is found dead in a Los Angeles skyscraper occupied by a large Japanese corporation, detectives John Connor and Web Smith are called in to investigate. Although Connor has previous experience working in Japan, cultural differences ma...

Down-on-his-luck veteran Tsugumo Hanshirō enters the courtyard of the prosperous House of Iyi. Unemployed, and with no family, he hopes to find a place to commit seppuku—and a worthy second to deliver the coup de grâce in his suicide ritual. The seni...

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons....

Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue come...

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....

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them....

Love at Twenty unites five directors from five different countries to present their different perspectives on what love really is at the age of 20. The episodes are united with the score of Georges Delerue and still photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson....

The mother of a feudal lord's only heir is kidnapped away from her husband by the lord. The husband and his samurai father must decide whether to accept the unjust decision, or risk death to get her back....

An adaptation of “The Courier for Hell” (“Meido no Hikyaku”) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725)....

A crippled kabuki player is taken into a strolling company of itinerant actors. An influential publisher notices his honest, bold drawings, and nurtures him despite persecution and betrayal. The film explores the eternal relationship between artist a...

A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality....

A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest....

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small ...

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 blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her....

A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls....

An intimate chronicle of the shooting of Ran (1985), a film directed by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa....

A gangster gets released from prison and has to cope with the recent shifts of power between the gangs, while taking care of a thrill-seeking young woman, who got in bad company while gambling....

This is the sequel to Jose Torres (1959), the portrayal of Puerto Rican boxer Jose Torres, who won a silver medal in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. We follow Torres from his training in preparation to challenge world lightweight champion Willie Pastran...

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