1968 • Japan • Directed by Kōsaku Yamashita

Wandering female gambler Oryu the Red Peony (Junko Fuji), so known for the tattoo on her shoulder, rambles into town searching for her father’s killer with a wallet left at the crime scene as her only clue. At a card game she meets a kindred spirit, th...

1967 • Japan • Directed by Kazuo Mori

Ichikawa’s lone wolf assassin is back in A Killer’s Key, this time masquerading as a traditional dance instructor named Nitta who is called in to avert a potential financial scandal that threatens to engulf a powerful yakuza group with ties to powerful figur...

1967 • Japan • Directed by Kazuo Mori

In A Certain Killer, Shiozaki’s low-profile existence as a chef at a local sushi restaurant serves as a front for his true job as a professional assassin whose modus operandi is poisoned needles. He’s approached by Maeda, a low-ranking member of a local yaku...

1964 • Japan • Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Three brothers find themselves pitted against each other as rivals in the Yakuza underworld. Jiro robs stolen loot from his younger brother, Sabu, and his gang. When their eldest brother, Kuroki, learns of this, he makes his own plans to conspire against...

1974 • Japan • Directed by Hideo Gosha

After making his name in the samurai genre, master filmmaker Hideo Gosha (Three Outlaw Samurai, Samurai Wolf) turned his camera to the world of the yakuza and the violent streets they control. Legendary gangster-turned-actor Noboru Ando plays Egawa, a retir...

Legendary Toei director Teruo Ishii tells three stories of moral sickness set during Japan's prosperous Genroku era in this bloody follow-up to his sexploitation classic Shogun's Joy of Torture, and the fourth entry in Toei's 'abnormal love' film series. Ishii's politically incorrect moral lesson...

1978 • Japan • Directed by Tôru Murakawa

In The Killing Game, Narumi finds himself caught in the midst of violent yakuza gang warfare, while his own brutal past catches up with him in the form of two beautiful women still bearing the emotional scars of his past assignments.

1998 • Japan • Directed by Toshiaki Toyoda

A young man decides one day to start killing yakuza. After he kills his first two he gets roped into helping a wannabe gangster and his bumbling underlings to perform a hit. While things work out in the beginning, this young psychopath quickly becomes m...

1981 • Japan • Directed by Shinji Sômai

A perky high-schooler takes on the mob in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, a one-of-a-kind genre-bender that riffs on the yakuza film, coming-of-age drama and ‘idol movie’, inventively adapted from Jiro Akagawa's popular novel by director Shinji Somai (Typhoo...

1975 • Japan • Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

Considered by many to be director Kinji Fukasaku's greatest single-film achievement in the yakuza genre, Cops vs Thugs was made at the height of popularity of Toei Studios' jitsuroku boom: realistic, modern crime movies based on true stories taken from c...

Burst City is an explosive Molotov cocktail of dystopian sci-fi, Mad Max-style biker wars against yakuza gangsters and the police, and riotous performances from members of the real-life Japanese punk bands The Stalin, The Roosters, The Rockers and INU. In a derelict industrial wasteland somewhere...

1995 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike

The first entry in Takashi Miike’s “Black Society Trilogy,” Shinjuku Triad Society burst into cinemas in Japan in 1995 - and announced the birth of a radical new artist in the world of genre filmmaking. Although he had made his debut in 1991, Miike had wo...

1999 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike

Ley Lines moves from the countryside to the city and back, as three Japanese youths of Chinese descent (including The Raid 2's Kazuki Kitamura) seek their fortune in Tokyo, only to run afoul of a violent gang boss.

1997 • Japan • Directed by Takashi Miike

Rainy Dog is about an exiled Yakuza who finds himself saddled with a son he never knew he had and a price on his head after the Chinese gang he works for decides to turn on him.

1972 ･ Japan ･ Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

When Okita Isamu (Bunta Sugawara, Cops VS Thugs) re-emerges onto the mean streets of Kawazaki after five years in prison for a string of brutal crimes, he comes face to face with prostitute Kinuyo, who immediately pinpoints him as one of the participants...

When Battles Without Honour and Humanity first hit Japanese screens in January 1973, partially inspired by the success of The Godfather, it blasted out a new Ground Zero for crime cinema not only in Japan, but in the rest of the world, and spawned a legendary series that would lead to additional ...

The celebrated Battles Without Honour and Humanity series continues with its second episode, Hiroshima Death Match, setting aside part one protagonist Shôzô Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) to follow a side story showcasing genre icons Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Meiko Kaji (Female Prisoner 701: ...

Moving beyond the true stories dramatized in the first two episodes of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara embark on their most complex narrative yet in Proxy War, a multi-character web of alliances and betrayals set against the ...

Continuing the storyline begun in episode three of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series, Police Tactics sees director Kinji Fukasaku and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara further depicting the life-and-death struggle of the gangsters of Hiroshima and Kure, even as the rest of Japan is beginni...

The Final Episode of the Battles Without Honour and Humanity series brought a new, more contemporary mood to the film and its characters. The yakuza may be starting to resemble a legitimate business, but director Kinji Fukasaku, working with new screenwriter Kôji Takada, never lets the audience f...

Bunta Sugawara is Miyoshi, a low-level assassin of the Yamamori gang who is sent to jail after a bungled hit. While in stir, family member Aoki (Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama) attempts to seize power from the boss, and Miyoshi finds himself stuck between the two factions with no honoura...

Nozaki, a labourer who swears allegiance to a sympathetic crime boss, only to find himself elected his successor after the boss is murdered. Restrained by a gang alliance that forbids retributions against high-level members, Nozaki forms a plot to exact revenge on his rivals, but a suspicious rel...

In the second entry, The Boss's Head, Sugawara is Kuroda, an itinerant gambler who steps in when a hit by drug-addicted assassin Kusunoki (Tampopo's Tsutomu Yamazaki) goes wrong, and takes the fall on behalf of the Owada family, but when the gang fails to make good on financial promises to him, K...

Set during the turbulent post-war years, Fukasaku's original 1975 film charts the rise and fall of real-life gangster Rikio Ishikawa (Tetsuya Watari, Outlaw Gangster VIP). Shot through with the same stark realism and quasi-documentarian approach as Fukasaku's earlier Battles Without Honor and Hum...