Japanese Noir Movies

Based on the original novel by Tokuda Shusei, adapted by frequent Masumura scribe Kaneto Shindo, this downbeat melodrama features a battle of women...

Yoshida's first feature follows the lives of young students against a background of jazz, emptiness and boredom. The plot is fairly simple: a...

Journalist Kuroki is investigating clandestine arms sales to Southeast Asia. He discovers that the point man in an arms trade was also involved in...

Gang 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.

Set 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...

A former boxer gets involved with a club hostess trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer.

Koreyoshi Kurahara's ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking,...

When a married man begins an affair with a woman from his past, he comes to suspect her young son intends to murder him.

A youth drama set in a Japanese university which is home to a group of active, leftist students.

Kaze 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...

A top police-guard, charged with protecting a visiting politician and ruthless dictator, contends with an assassin set to kill the man.

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....

Shortly 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...

Raizô Ichikawa reprises his role as the restaurant-cook-turned-contract-killer in this sequel to Kazuo Mori's stylish 1967 thriller A Certain...

A noir drama depicting the downfall of a veteran detective who hates evil and falls into its depths. Ace detective Sugai pursues Chiyo, the mistress...

It tells the story of a couple who fall into a trap set up by a sinister organization. One of them is a guy who is framed for the murder of his...

Freelance reporter “Scoop” Machida is hot on the trail of a prostitution ring called the Black Line, when he is framed for the murder of...

After a successful robbery the culprits, from very different backgrounds, at once turn on each other.

Film director and screenwriter Seijun Suzuki (1923-2017), who in the sixties was the great innovator of Japanese cinema; and his collaborator, art...