The Motive 2004
Four people are discovered brutally murdered in an up-scale high-rise apartment. All the victims appear to be family, but as the investigation deepens it is discovered that one of the victims isn't related to the family.
Four people are discovered brutally murdered in an up-scale high-rise apartment. All the victims appear to be family, but as the investigation deepens it is discovered that one of the victims isn't related to the family.
It is 1965. High-school student Takeyoshi Fujiwara hears "Pipeline" by the Ventures, and is mesmerized by their unique sound. With three friends, he forms a band called "The Rocking Horsemen." A warm and comic glimpse into high-school and small-town life in Japan in the 60's.
The Kitao family is coping with the loss of the eldest daughter, Chizuko, who was killed in a freak accident the year prior. When the other daughter Mika is suddenly in a dangerous situation, Chizuko returns as a ghost to save her; reunited with her sister, Mika begins spending time with Chizuko again.
Spring, 1941. Sixteen-year-old Toshihiko attends school in the coastal town of Karatsu, where his aunt cares for his ailing cousin. Immersed in the seaside's nature and culture, Toshihiko soon befriends the town's other extraordinary adolescents as they all contend with the war's gravitational pull.
The only movie theater on the Onomichi seafront is about to close its doors. Its last night of screenings will be an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three young men in the audience find themselves thrown back in time into the world inside the screen.
A heartwarming, based-on-true-story of how a hearing-impaired couple, Masahiro and Namiko, knew each other, got married and began participating in the Triathlon. The story is told in flashbacks as Namiko awaits childbirth.
Ayase Shinsuke, a popular writer of a series of girl novels, visits Otaru, the town he grew up in. He meets a strange boy who calls himself by the author's real name.
People from all walks of life all receive mysterious messages from loved ones who were killed 3 months earlier in a shipwreck. They are instructed to go to a small island in the Inland Sea that evening.
Relatives gather from afar in wintery Ashibetsu upon the death of patriarch Mitsuo. A mysterious woman named Nobuko suddenly shows up. Her appearance gradually exposes wartime secrets and Mitsuo's unknown past.
Shunzo is a popular greengrocer in a town near Tokyo. His life, and the lives of his wife Michi, and their two children, undergoes a dramatic change when he encounters Li, a poor college student from China.
A Francophile filmmaker in a creative rut tries to pass off a free-spirited young actress as his movie-star wife in order to fool a chief from the South Seas.
Film director Mario Baba meets a mysterious gentleman, and realizes he is a important man from his boyhood. The two chase each other around, causing a lot of commotion.
Depicts the life of Nagaharu Yodogawa.
Hazel suffers from a crippling case of agoraphobia - so much so that it causes a rift between her and her mother, Dee. They agree that Hazel will go to a treatment facility to help her deal with her fear, transported by a driver and specialty van from the facility. But when two masked gunmen attack them on the desert road, Hazel has to battle her fears so she and her mother can survive.
After noticing in the news there was a fire in an old canal town, Eguchi recalls visiting there a decade ago as a university student.
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.
Toshiko does not have long to live. She wants to make the most of her time while she can and takes a sojourn to where her true hometown for which she has so much nostalgia and admiration. With her husband on her side she remains can-do and keeps her chin up, but can only lament the passing of time and what will happen next to everyone and everything she loves.
Veteran filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi rounds out the second of his two trilogies about his hometown of Onomichi with this film about the budding relationship between a young lad and an eccentric old man. Fifth-grader Yuta (Takuro Atsugi) is a typical city child looking forward to a summer of reading comic books and playing video games. Instead, he is bundled off to his grandparent's house on the Inland Sea. His grandfather, Yuta's parents explain, has been acting strangely as of late -- he eats the offerings in the family altar and once tried to lead attendants at a funeral in a rousing round of calisthenics. Since his mother and father are swamped with work, and his elder sister (Nana Sano) is studying for college entrance exams, Yuta has been asked to look after Grandpa. The old man takes Yuta on a tour of Onomichi, regaling him with 70 years of its history. Along the way, Grandpa slips in and out of the past, increasingly unable to discern between the two.
A detective film by Nobuhiko Ōbayashi. Made for TV.
A comprehensive document of the six-month production of "Casting Blossoms to the Sky," mixing truth and fiction.