Kenji Mizoguchi Ugetsu Monogatari

Umekichi, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, feels obliged to help her lover Furusawa when he asks to stay with her after becoming bankrupt and leaving his wife. However her younger sister Omocha tells her she is wasting her time and money on a loser. She thinks that they should both find wealthy patrons to support them. Omocha therefore tries various schemes to get rid of Furusawa, and set themselves up with better patrons.

Fusako Owada, a young woman in postwar Japan, is the mistress of a notorious drug dealer. Fusako's tenuous grasp on meaningful life is shaken when she learns that her lover is having an affair with her sister.

A young couple of lovers want to travel to Tokio to work and form a family there, but the parents of him want his son to regent their hotel. Finally, he does what his parents want him to, and her finds herself abandoned in the big city.

A fifty-year-old prostitute, no longer able to attract men, looks back on her sad life. Once a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court at Kyoto, Oharu fell in love with, and became the lover of, a man below her station. They were discovered, and Oharu and her family were exiled. For Oharu there followed a life filled with one sorrow and humiliation after another.

A small theatrical troupe revisits a remote island town after some years' absence. The aging leading actor is particularly anxious to stop because he had a son by one of the local women and wants to see him again. It was photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, one of Japan's greatest cinematographers (Rashomon, Yojimbo, Ugetsu, Enjo, Kagi). Ozu said, "About this time, CinemaScope was getting popular. I wanted to have nothing to do with it, and consequently I shot more close-ups and used shorter shots." (Reacting against the long shots and long scenes typical to Scope movies of the time). Donald Richie called this film, "the most physically beautiful of all of Ozu's pictures".

Kenji Misumi's Zatoichi Monogatari is the first film in the legendary Zatoichi film series starring Shintaro Katsu as Zatoichi, the blind masseur and master swordsman. This beginning film has Ichi visiting his friend, Boss Sukegoro, as he passes by the town of Iioka. He discovers that Boss Sukegoro is in the midst of a feud with the next town over, Sasagawa, lead by Boss Shigezo. After much convincing and begging, Ichi’s talents are reluctantly bought to side with Boss Sukegoro in the upcoming war.

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and Shizu to marry so that she can remain close to Shinnosuke.

This heartrending masterpiece by Kenji Mizoguchi about the give-and-take between life and art marked the first full realization of the hypnotic long takes and eloquent camera movements that would come to define the director’s films. Kikunosuke (Shotaro Hanayagi), the adopted son of a legendary kabuki actor who is striving to achieve stardom by mastering female roles, turns to his infant brother’s wet nurse for support and affection—and she soon gives up everything for her beloved’s creative glory. Offering a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of kabuki theater in the late nineteenth century, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum provides a critique of the oppression of women and the sacrifices required of them, and represents the pinnacle of Mizoguchi’s early career.