"Actor: Nenji Kobayashi"

• The Twilight Samurai | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £6.89   |  Saving you £6.10 (88.53%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Highly acclaimed Japanese historical drama set in the late 1800s about a low-ranking samurai Seibei (Hiroyuki Sanada) who has been caring for his two adored daughters and his aging mother since the death of his wife. While his co-workers go out drinking at the end of the day he heads straight home to his family earning the nickname 'Twilight Samurai'. A new chance of happiness appears to open up for Seibei when a long-ago childhood love Tomoe moves back to the area after fleeing her brutish husband. To defend her honour Seibei challenges her husband to a duel - which he wins despite being armed only with a sharpened stick. Seibei is then asked if he wants to marry Tomoe with whom he is desperately in love but tragically the Samurai code of honour and his shame about his poverty-stricken status force him to refuse her.

• The Twilight Samurai | DVD | (22/11/2004) from £17.98   |  Saving you £2.01 (10.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A low-ranking samurai must accept a deadly challenge with a rogue samurai just as he discovers that his childhood love is beyond his reach.

• Yakuza Graveyard | DVD | (19/08/2002) from £8.47   |  Saving you £7.52 (88.78%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Yakuza Graveyard was one of the stylish, morally ambivalent movies with which director Kinji Fukasaki revolutionised the Japanese gangster genre in the 1970s. These days more famous for his brilliant teen exploitation film Battle Royale, Fukasaki has a proven flair for unsettlingly violent scenes in which the camera dips and twirls as his characters throw each other down stairs and across rooms. An honest cop (Tetsuya Watari) is stationed in Osaka and finds himself caught up in a nightmare world where his superiors launder money and carry out hits for several rival gangs. His sense of honour--already supporting the drunken, promiscuous widow of a man he killed--ties him ever closer to the principal heavy of the gang his superiors are gradually destroying and to the man's half-sister, with whom he falls passionately in love. A torrid interlude as waves beat on the shore--waves that somehow manage to be something other than a cliché--is just a break in the gloomy spiral of degradation and death. This is in some ways as corny as anything, in other ways a minor classic. On the DVD: Yakuza Graveyard is presented in 16:9 widescreen and comes with a short text essay explaining the importance of the film in the development of Fukasaki's career and the yakuza genre. --Roz Kaveney

• Cafe Lumiere | DVD | (19/09/2005) from £26.98   |  Saving you £-6.99 (-35.00%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Yoko (Hitoto Yo) is a young Japanese writer researching the life of Taiwanese musician Jiang Wen-ye who was popular in Japan during the 1930s. Raised by her uncle in Yubari but living in Tokyo with her father and stepmother Yoko becomes friends with Hajime (Asano Tadanobu) the owner of a secondhand bookstore. They often meet in her favorite coffee shop making small talk and enjoying the passing scene. He is a train buff who spends his days riding the subway recording the sound of trains public address announcements and the conversations of passengers. Though they are best friends he is startled to find out that she is pregnant by a Taiwanese whom against her strict parents' wishes she does not want to marry... Acutely observed and exquisitely realized Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 16th film is a loving tribute to the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. The film the first by Hou to be shot in a foreign location pays homage to Ozu by depicting themes repeated in many of his films: relationships between aging parents the marriage plans of a grown child the coming and going of trains and the quiet contemplation of everyday life.

• Street Mobster | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £6.98   |  Saving you £9.01 (129.08%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Explosive Japanese cool hits the retail DVD market in the shape of Eureka Video's 'Street Mobster'. Internationally acclaimed guru director Kinji Fukasaku the highly distinguished exponent of ultra violence with a purpose. Street mobster Isamu Okita likes fighting and girls and is just out of prison for killing a rival in a bath-house. On release he finds things have changed: old gangs no longer have the power they once enjoyed. So he teams up with Kizaki an aspiring gangster who suggests he revive his old gang to take on existing mobs and claim their territory.