Tony Rayns

1895, Japan. In a small village, Seki is the wife of the litter carrier Gisaburo. Seki has an affair with Toyiji, a man twenty-six years younger her. Toyiji becomes jealous of Gisaburo and plots with Seki to kill him. After Gisaburo has had plenty of sake to drink and goes to bed, the two strangle Gisaburo and dump his body inside a well in the woods. Seki tells the locals that Gisaburo moved to Tokyo to work. Finally, three years later, suspicions...

Portrays postwar Japan through the power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka, where American soldiers are based.

Sadako is a typical Imamura heroine: one who revels in the pleasures of food, labor, sex, and self-preservation. Carrying the burden of her status as a lowly, poor, prostitute-birthed commoner wife, Sadako is subjected to an escalating series of belittlement both at home and in society.

Tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire seven out-of-work warriors to protect them from invading bandits.

The colossally popular Zatoichi films make up the longest-running action series in Japanese history and created one of the screen's great heroes: an itinerant blind masseur who also happens to be a lightning-fast swordsman. Features the string of twenty-five Zatoichi films made between 1962 and 1973, starring Shintaro Katsu, collected in one package for the first t