Best Japanese Films Kinema Junpo (1926-2025)

Ryota Nonomiya is a successful businessman driven by money. He learns that his biological son was switched with another child after birth. He must make a life-changing decision and choose his true son or the boy he raised as his own.

A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.

In a valley, with a dense growth of trees, a baby is killed. The baby's mother Satomi is arrested as the prime suspect. The police also learn that Satomi is involved in a romantic relationship with her next door neighbor Ozaki. The information was provided by the neighbor's lover Kanako.

2013 film by Nobuhiro Yamashita

Didgeridoo performer GOMA developed higher brain dysfunction as the result of an expressway accident. While looking back on his rehabilitation and recovery with his family's help, animation recreates his “flashbacks” - incongruous images that suddenly appear in his brain. This completely new style of 3D movie that blends past footage, flashbacks, and studio performances is also emphatically a story of familial love.

From the late 1950s through the '70s, more than 90,000 of the ethnic Koreans in Japan emigrated to North Korea, a country that promised them affluence, justice, and an end to discrimination. KAZOKU NO KUNI tells the story of one of their number, who returns for just a short period. For the first time in 25 years, Sonho is reunited with his family in Tokyo after being allowed to undergo an operation there. Sonho’s younger sister Rie is at the centre of the film, and is not hard to recognise as the director’s alter-ego. In her documentaries DEAR PYONGYANG and SONA, THE OTHER MYSELF, Yang Yonghi told the story of her own life, and how, at age six, she experienced the departure of her three older brothers, who left their family for Pyongyang.

2010 film by Daihachi Yoshida

2012 film by Takeshi Kitano

Shinzo Egi is an asthma sufferer who does not want to be place on life support. As a last request, Shinzo Egi asks his doctor Ayano Orii if she could follow his wish. Doctor Ayano Orii is then questioned in a criminal case because of her decision.

In this offbeat coming-of-age tale, a charming, rebellious high school dropout named Kanta befriends the kind, provincial Shoji. The two bring out the best in each other, each gaining confidence from their friendship - especially regarding pursuit of the opposite sex. The working class Kanta becomes a sort of unruly anti-hero, maintaining his pride, defiance, and self-assurance even as his prospects seem increasingly grim.

Best-selling novelist Kosaku Igami has made a career out of using his family as fodder for his novels, much to their dismay. When his mother, the spirited family matriarch, is diagnosed with dementia, Igami must come to terms with the toll his own behavior has taken on his increasingly distant family and resolve his own long-simmering resentments. Evocative of classic Ozu, this gorgeously wrought epic family portrait explores the tenderness and trappings of familial bonds.

Based on the award-winning novel of the same name, this portrait of a group of vulnerable, variously wounded people — a depressed housewife, her high-school-aged lover, and his best friend, who is struggling to provide for himself and his senile grandmother — whose intersecting lives yield both sorrow and a fragile, yet enduring, hope for a brighter future.

2012 film by Kenji Uchida

An old couple, their only son, the son's wife, a young man and his lover live peacefully in a village. Then, a terrifying earthquake strikes that causes a nearby nuclear station to explode. The residents must evacuate, but the family lives on a farm, with only half of the area designated as an evacuation area.

After losing their restaurant in a fire, a husband and wife come up with a strange plan to rebuild their shattered finances: marrying the husband off to a series of lonely women and defrauding them.

In the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a journalist arrives in Nagaoka, a city decimated during a WWII air raid and by the 2004 Chūetsu earthquakes, to report on the disaster; there, she learns about the experiences of its inhabitants and stumbles upon a stage play written by an enigmatic student of her ex-boyfriend.

After her werewolf lover unexpectedly dies in an accident, a woman must find a way to raise the son and daughter that she had with him. However, their inheritance of their father's traits prove to be a challenge for her.

Kota hears about an impending 1.5 billion yen gold bar heist from his friend Kitagawa, a former college classmate, and decides to take part. The gold bar sits in the basement of the HQ of Sumita Bank. Helping Kota and Kitagawa are bank security employee Noda, a North Korean spy pretending to be a college student, Kitagawa's younger brother Haruki and a former elevator engineer. These 6 men are about to carry the boldest of schemes to bypass the bank's high-tech defense system.

2011 film by Sion Sono

Five years after a hit-and-run accident kills his wife, a distraught metalworker comes face to face with the man behind the steering wheel.