Jungle Block

In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words used by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.

Daigo, a cellist, is laid off from his orchestra and moves with his wife back to his small hometown where the living is cheaper. Thinking he’s applying for a job at a travel agency he finds he’s being interviewed for work with departures of a more permanent nature – as an undertaker’s assistant.

Upon being sent to live with relatives in the countryside due to an illness, an emotionally distant adolescent girl becomes obsessed with an abandoned mansion and infatuated with a girl who lives there - a girl who may or may not be real.

Brash, loudmouthed and opportunistic, Kikujiro is the unlikely companion for Masao who is determined to see the mother he has never met. The two begin a series of adventures which soon turns out to be a whimsical journey of laughter and tears with a wide array of surprises and unique characters along the way.

In a small village in a valley everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave the village and go to a certain mountain top to die. If anyone should refuse they would disgrace their family. Old Orin is 69. This winter it is her turn to go to the mountain. But first she must make sure that her eldest son Tatsuhei finds a wife.

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 on a handsome young samurai named Sozaburo Kano. The school's stern master can choose to intervene, or to let Kano decide his own path.

A married woman and her lover murder her husband and dump his body into a well, but his ghost returns to haunt them as the local gossip intensifies.

A businessman kills his adulterous wife and is sent to prison. After his release, he opens a barbershop and meets new people, talking to almost no one except for an eel he befriended while in prison.

A backstage documentary and interview with the real life lesbian stage performer Kaoru Kiri mixed with a fictional life of her rejected lover.

A thief, a murderer, and a charming lady-killer, Iwao Enokizu is on the run from the police.

A newlywed wife suffers the consequences for her husband’s actions when he cheats a customer at his credit company out of a large sum of money.

A melodrama centered on adolescent high school students that depicts the secrets and joys and sorrows known only to them.

A man and a woman whose love is forbidden due to a feud between their parents resolve to die together and head to the island of Sado.

During the Edo Period, a noblewoman's banishment for her love affair with a lowly page signals the beginning of her inexorable fall.

The neglected common-law wife of a Japanese librarian is repeatedly harassed by a young man with a heart condition who seduces her with the prospect of a better life.

Following the death of the unmarried and childless Taki, Takeshi, a young relative of hers, discovers several pages of closely written lines in which the old lady has recorded her memories. This is how he learns the truth about her youth working as a housemaid and nanny for the Hirai family in a little house in Tokyo with a red gabled roof.

When the wife of a 17th-century Kyoto scrollmaker is falsely accused of having an affair with his best employee, the pair flee the city and find themselves truly falling for one another.

A woman, Tome, is born to a lower class family in Japan in 1918. The title refers to an insect, repeating its mistakes, as in an infinite circle. Imamura, with this metaphor, introduces the life of Tome, who keeps trying to change her poor life.

A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims.

Volunteering as a "comfort woman" on the Manchurian front, where she is expected to service hundreds of soldiers, Harumi is commandeered by the brutal Lieutenant Narita but falls for the sensitive Mikami, Narita's direct subordinate. Seijun Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is a tragic love story as well as a rule-bending take on a popular Taijiro Tamura novel, challenging military and fraternal codes of honor, as seen through Harumi's eyes.

In the midst of a match, Hayato, a successful boxer, has had enough of the sport. He lets himself get knocked out, and quits boxing, leaving his wife and living alone with his mangy dog. One day a young mediocre boxer knocks at the door and wants to be Hayato's apprentice.

With a Kansai syndicate setting their sights on Tokyo, a former yakuza boss gets dragged back into a world of violence.

Four sisters with no consanguinity are living together since childhood. When facing misfortune and grievances in lives, they give support and encouragement to each other, even sacrifice oneself to help others.

Fresh out of jail, a smart-mouth wise guy Goro takes the name “Big Brother Katsumata.” Not fitting in well with established gangs, he forms a rag-tag gang called “the Shinjuku Brothers.” The members of their gang are thugs who only wish they were traditional yakuza. When they turn up at the funeral for a gangster, they are not welcomed, but a senior boss intervenes to keep things calm. The boss of bosses invites them to join a respected local council of warlords. Katsumata is suspicious of why such powerful men would extend an invitation to lowlife like himself.

Emerging from a stint in prison, yakuza lieutenant Sumukawa discovers that his gang has disintegrated. An ambitious type, he quickly hooks up with another gang who promise him a prominent position if he helps them deal with a rival family. But bonds are made to be broken, and pledges of loyalty soon give way to competition, betrayal and — naturally — retaliation.

Fumiko, mother of two and wife to 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 her final stages, Fumiko meets a young journalist from Tokyo who wants to write a story on her experiences.

A yakuza man who dreads being released from prison, yet the day of his release arrives. Awaiting him are a woman’s burning gaze and the muzzle of a gangster’s gun…

In 1880s Japan, women's struggle for equality rages on. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government.

A Buddhist monk becomes ensnared by a seductive woman who, according to legend, transforms her lovers into beasts.

The most dangerous hired gun in Kyushu's underworld has managed to trigger a vicious gang war, and now, there's a contract on his life. Though nobody is more skilled in the arts of dealing death, can the tattooed hitman fend off the entire Japanese mafia as he searches for the man who wants him dead?

A young man travels to Egypt and becomes embroiled in an independence movement by chance. Produced entirely on location overseas, which was groundbreaking at the time.

Reiko Ike stars as the daughter of a man who has been pushed into drug dealing by the local Yakuza mob. Having outlived his usefulness to the gang he is murdered and Reiko is gang raped, leading her to attempt a knife attack on the Yakuza boss (Ryoji Hayama) at a swank nightclub. Failing to kill him she ends up in prison, where she befriends a crew of other malcontents (including Yumiko Katayama and Chiyoko Kazama) and meets the Yakuza boss's girlfriend (Miki Sugimoto). Upon release Reiko reassembles her mob and launches a Machiavellian scheme to engineer a gang war between Hayama's Oba Industries and the formerly dominant Hamayasu Clan. The rival gangs begin killing each other off and Reiko works her way closer to her ultimate vengeance.

When Sosuke, a young boy who lives on a clifftop overlooking the sea, rescues a stranded goldfish named Ponyo, he discovers more than he bargained for. Ponyo is a curious, energetic young creature who yearns to be human, but even as she causes chaos around the house, her father, a powerful sorcerer, schemes to return Ponyo to the sea.

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

Several years after Shuzo settled his wife’s birthday-surprise divorce proposal (What a Wonderful Family, 40th), the Hirata family faces new problems. Ignoring his family’s worry that he is too old to drive, Shuzo takes his old schoolmate for a spin after carousing. Soon, a new disturbance arises for the Hirata family. Veteran director Yamada Yoji continues his comedy about the “perfect“ Japanese family turned upside down in chaos, laughters and understanding. This time, with an additional taste of death.

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.

A lonely university student develops a romance with a beautiful interesting woman, who turns out to be a cyborg from the future.

Chieko Izumi is a reporter for the magazine "Weekly Japanese Women". She had come to Tokyo to stay with her aunt in order to escape her stubborn grandmother in her hometown in Kyushu, who was trying to force her to marry Komori, the local ringleader.

A moving story depicting the spirit of a young marathon runner who set a new world record in Boston, encouraged by the love of his family, a young woman’s prayers, and warm friendship.

A beautiful dancer who lost her mother and was raised abroad searches for her long-lost father in the homeland she has always longed for.

The God of Water and the Goddess of Fire, who once lived in harmony, were torn apart by the Lord of the Winds. Their children, Sirius, heir to the Water Kingdom, and Malta, heir to the Fire Kingdom, become aware of the existence of their other worlds and fall in love. Their parents, however, disapprove, leading to a tale of star-crossed lovers trapped between life and death, water and fire.

A young engineer and a pure-hearted mountain girl take on the challenges of the Akan primeval forest, where lawlessness and violence run rampant.

Romm pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s–1940s Europe, but also to a firm conviction that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.