Asian Movies : Drama

The Aimless Bullet (Obaltan) is a Korean classic, which captured the social issues at its extremities in Korea of the late 1950s. Song Chul-ho (Jin Kyu Kim), a clerk at an accounting office in Seoul, attempts to support his mentally ill mother, his pregnant wife, his lonely sister, his two children,...

In Kurosawa's HAMLET-like story of corporate scandal in post-war Japan, a young man attempts to use his position at the heart of a corrupt company to expose the men responsible for his father's death....

First of a trilogy of films. During the Second World War, a Japanese conscientious objector named Kaji works as a supervisor in a Manchurian prison camp. He hopes to avoid duty as a soldier, but he also hopes to be helpful to the welfare of his prisoners. An escape attempt by Chinese prisoners resul...

Kiyoshi is a brooding young man who treats women solely as objects. Makoto is a young woman who is just reaching her sexual awakening......

Second part of a trilogy. Conscientious objector Kaji, now forced to serve in the Japanese army during the Second World War, helps a friend defect to the Russians and nearly goes with him. But despite his opposition to war, Kaji does his best to serve as help and guide to the men in his charge, most...

A transposition of Shakespeare’s ’Macbeth’ to medieval Japan. After a great military victory, Lords Washizu and Miki are lost in the dense Cobweb Forest, where they meet a mysterious old woman who predicts great things for Washizu and even greater things for Miki’s descendant...

Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world and their place in it, despite the fact that she knows full well that most of them will die in the war....

A veteran samurai, who has fallen on hard times, answers a village's request for protection from bandits. He gathers 6 other samurai to help him, and they teach the townspeople how to defend themselves, and they supply the samurai with three small meals a day. The film culminates in a giant battle w...

Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing. He learns he is dying of cancer and wants to find some meaning in his life. He finds himself unable to talk with his family, and spends a night on the town w...

Post war Hiroshima: It's been four years since the last time she visited her hometown. Takako faces the after effects of the A-bomb when she travels around the city to call on old friends....