Movies: Kazuo Kato

With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war a...

In the midst of an attempt to take over his company, a powerhouse executive is hit with a huge ransom demand when his chauffeur's son is kidnapped by mistake....

This film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them—the homeless father and son envisioning their dream house; the young woman abused...

Kiichi Nakajima, an elderly foundry owner, is convinced that Japan will be affected by an imminent nuclear war, and resolves to move his family to safety in Brazil. His family decides to have him ruled incompetent and Dr. Harada, a Domestic Court cou...

The survivors of a plane crash in a remote area are attacked by blob-like alien creatures that turn their victims into blood-thirsty vampires....

After a woman is framed for the murder of her fisherman husband, she seeks out a bloody revenge on the corrupt businessmen responsible....

Toru Hayashi is an unremarkable bachelor who lives with his mother, until one day a young woman named Rumi moves in in the apartment upstairs. Rumi is a self-proclaimed master thief, but she needs socially awkward Toru's help to actually kickstart he...

A taut, economical policier-cum-gang-hostage thriller....

Wild young people kidnap a wealthy woman and she becomes attracted to one of them. When she tells the man that she is the mistress of a religious leader, he and his posse make plans to rob her partner....

Two women are ferried to a small prison colony on the remote and barren prison island, where they and their fellow inmates are forced to perform perilous slave labor along the island’s treacherous cliffs, overseen by both an unforgiving sun and a cre...

A hunchbacked caretaker presides over a forlorn mansion inhabited by the ghosts of his previous masters. An unbelieving trio (a doctor, his assistant and his niece) fail to heed the caretaker's warnings and are slaughtered horribly by the jealous occ...

There are two bizarre rumors spreading about a girls' high school called “Seiwa Joshi Gakuen.” The first is a “Hanako-san in the Toilet”-like story about a painting that hangs in the principal's office = young twin sisters who escape from the paintin...

After a passenger ship sinks in 1954, Go Akutsu devises a life-saving project in the form of a tunnel under the Tsugaru Strait. While working on this project Akutsu becomes involved with Tae Makimura leading to his estrangement from his wife....

Coinciding with the LDP presidential election of the entire national public, a masterpiece depicting the reverse side of Showa political history released, superimposed cast, a group image of real politicians centered on Shigeru Yoshida and political ...

Based on the novel of the same name by Seichô Matsumoto....

After appearing on a TV program a young woman is recruited to be an advertising idol much to the dismay of her boyfriend....

It is based on the story "The Lawyer" by attorney Hiroshi Masaki and his account of Japan's "Headless Murder Case" in which a police officer beat a suspect to death during the Pacific War....

On a post-war peaceful day in Japan, Toyomatsu Shimizu, a barber as well as a good father and husband, is suddenly arrested by the Prefectural Police as a war criminal and sued for murder....

Masuda Toshio film starring Watari Tetsuya and Mori Masayuki, about a lone-wolf type (Watari) seeking love and defending the honor of an elderly widower (Mori)....

Kotiyama is a swindler and extortionist, the head of a whole gang of crooks, usually posing as a poor monk; once he really took vows, but he was kicked out of the monastery long ago. He is enterprising, smart and not too cruel, so his accomplices lov...