

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 suicide. Kobayashi then discovers evidence that points to the doctor sibling of an innocent girl. The climax in a rural snowy locale is suspenseful and well-staged.
1963-03-31
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8.3A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.
7.3Two 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.
7.0After a successful robbery the culprits, from very different backgrounds, at once turn on each other.
6.5Set in post-war Japan, a group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminated.
7.7In this loose adaptation of "Hamlet," illegitimate son Kôichi Nishi climbs to a high position within a Japanese corporation and marries the crippled daughter of company vice president Iwabuchi. At the reception, the wedding cake is a replica of their corporate headquarters, but an aspect of the design reminds the party of the hushed-up death of Nishi's father. It is then that Nishi unleashes his plan to avenge his father's death.
7.6Before 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 has second thoughts. Yet, even as he tries to back out, the body count starts climbing. Oida must now try to alert the people on his list of their impending danger, and find out why they are being targeted in the first place.
7.3A 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.
7.1After 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 gun-for-hire, to assassinate him. As the Viper trails his target through the countryside, the agile Phoenix Tetsu grows concerned that one of his former associates has betrayed him.
7.0A gang lord hires Kamimura, a hit man, to take out a rival boss who's gotten greedy.
7.0The murder of the chief official of Kobe city's Customs triggers an investigation of a prostitution ring called the 'Yellow Line' that sells Japanese women. A hired assassin is betrayed by his organization, and kidnaps a woman who happens to be the girlfriend of a newspaper reporter.
7.5When 150 guns are stolen from Iwakuni base and two police officers are shot dead, a detective criminal tries to find out the truth.
7.0Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidation is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.
6.0Gang 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.
5.6A promising post-graduate literature student is transformed into a psychotic killer following the suicide of his father and a sleazy affair by his mother with a younger man.
6.2Shortly after arriving in Kobe, "Jiro the Lefty", a killer with a natural talent, witnesses a man die in a crane accident which turns out to be a cover-up for a murder. Jiro soon finds himself on the run, tailed by a determined cop.
3.0Two 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 of them becomes himself romantically entangled with the boss's girlfriend. An ambitious underboss of the gang offers them a way out if they murder the previous boss but things don't turn out as planned (for everyone).
6.8High-end cabaret hostess Masuko discovers her long-term lover is actually married. Determined to secure her future, she aggressively manipulates him into divorcing his wife, only for their new marriage to be destabilized by the arrival of her young niece.
5.5Kaze 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.
6.5A youth drama set in a Japanese university which is home to a group of active, leftist students.
7.5Raizô Ichikawa reprises his role as the restaurant-cook-turned-contract-killer in this sequel to Kazuo Mori's stylish 1967 thriller A Certain Killer.