Sympathy for the Underdog

The Outsider

A former American G.I. joins a yakuza family after his release from prison in post-World War II Osaka.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima

Repeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hitman and falls in love with boss Muraoka's niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo draws our series' hero, Shozo Hirono, and the other yakuza into a new round of bloodshed.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.

Graveyard of Honor

A barkeeper saves a Yakuza boss' life and thus makes his way up in the organization. However, his fear of nothing soon causes problems.

Black Rain

Two New York cops get involved in a gang war between members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. They arrest one of their killers and are ordered to escort him back to Japan. However, in Japan he manages to escape, and as they try to track him down, they get deeper and deeper into the Japanese Mafia scene and they have to learn that they can only win by playing the game—the Japanese way.

Youth of the Beast

When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence.

Street Mobster

After serving time, a defiant street thug is incensed to find his town overrun by two yakuza factions. He gathers his crew and takes them on.

Sonatine

Murakawa, an aging Tokyo yakuza tiring of gangster life, is sent by his boss to Okinawa along with a few of his henchmen to help end a gang war, supposedly as mediators between two warring clans. He finds that the dispute between the clans is insignificant and whilst wondering why he was sent to Okinawa at all, his group is attacked in an ambush. The survivors flee and make a decision to lay low at the beach while they await further instructions.

The Yakuza

When George Tanner does business with high-ranking Yakuza Tono, Tono kidnaps his daughter, and George summons his old friend, private eye Harry Kilmer, to Japan to investigate.

Tokyo Drifter

After yakuza boss Kurata dissolves his own criminal empire, a rival kingpin offers a position to Kurata's top operative, Tetsuya "Phoenix Tetsu" Hondo. When the fiercely loyal Tetsu declines, Otsuka taps unstoppable Tatsuzo the "Viper", a ruthless gun-for-hire, to assassinate him. As the Viper trails his target through the countryside, the agile Phoenix Tetsu grows concerned that one of his former associates has betrayed him.

Gonin

Five men plot to steal a large sum of money from the local yakuza, but everything does not go as planned and the men find themselves hunted down by contract killers.

Agitator

When a young Yakuza torments the customers in a rival crime family's nightclub, it is not long before his dead body is found. Soon, inter-family retaliation follows, resulting in the death for a prominent crime boss. Devastated by this turn of events, the temperamental Kenzaki vows to avenge his boss's death and, as bloody violence ensues, the body count reaches excessive proportions.

Dead or Alive

Ryūichi and his small gang of Triad vie for control of the Japanese underworld in a crime-ridden Shinjuku quarter while Detective Jojima tries to bring it down.

The City of Lost Souls

Brazilian-Japanese gangster Mario rescues his Chinese girlfriend Kei as she's about to be deported from Japan. Desperate to escape, he hides in Tokyo's booming Japanese-Portuguese community and seeks passage from the country from a Russian mobster. To meet his price, they hold up a bigtime drug deal between the Chinese Mafia and the local Yakuza.

Outrage

When a tough yakuza gangster is betrayed by his bosses, it means all out war. Bodies pile up as he takes out everyone in his way to the top in a brutal quest for revenge.

Kids Return

Shinji and Masaru spend most of their school days harassing fellow classmates and playing pranks. They drop out and Shinji becomes a small-time boxer, while Masaru joins up with a local yakuza gang. However, the world is a tough place.

Outrage Coda

Five years after the all-out war between the Sanno and Hanabishi crime families, former yakuza boss Otomo works in South Korea for Mr. Chang, a noted fixer. When tensions rise between Chang and the Hanabishi, and Chang's life is endangered, Otomo returns to Japan to settle things once and for all.

In Full Bloom

Set shortly after the end of World War II, a philosophical boxing drama of two fighters from opposite worlds (USA and Japan) who are pulled together for a questionable fight arranged by their unscrupulous managers and the Yakuza.

Rainy Dog

A Japanese assassin stranded in Taiwan must take work from a local crime boss to make ends meet when suddenly a woman from his past delivers a son to him.

Beyond Outrage

As the police launch a full-scale crackdown on organized crime, it ignites a national yakuza struggle between the Sanno of the East and Hanabishi of the West. What started as an internal strife in Outrage has now become a nationwide war in Outrage Beyond.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

An assassin is shot by her ruthless employer, Bill, and other members of their assassination circle – but she lives to plot her vengeance.

Women's Police: Part II

Masaaki Kagari (Akira Kobayashi) is the recruiter and protector of hostesses at the Club Rose. One day he visits Club Aron, to complain about attempts to lure hostesses from Club Rose. Aron's madam Hisayo reminds him of a tragic experience five years before, when a lovely girl named Kumi committed double suicide with a man in a hotel. For Aron's madam is Kumi's elder sister. Kagari's friend Hayazaki introduces him to Chie, the young sister of the man who died with Kumi, who has come to Tokyo to learn the truth about her brother's death. Kagari sends them both away. But he continues to be haunted by the warmed-over memories. When Club Aron is found selling bootleg whisky Kagari learns that Hisayo has been a tool in the hands of the Akune group who are also responsible for trying to steal his girls, and that Fujikura, the public prosecutor who presided over the case of Kumi's death and ruled it suicide, is now the personal lawyer of the Akune group...

Women's Police: Swirling Butterflies

Aboard a night ferry in the Inland Sea, Masaaki Kagari (Akira Kobayashi), a young tough, who supplies hostesses to night spots, encounters Yuko, his ex-sweetheart. He considers himself a private underworld sort of policeman-in the com- munity of such women. Yuko, now a bar proprietress, is under the protection of Tahei Daigo, a sinister gang boss who in his quest for chances of good investments abroad plans to offer young girls to rich foreigners. Asked to gather attractive girls by Yuko, now Tahei's puppet, Masaaki collects many only to find them mysteriously missing...

HEAT -Incandescence- PART I

A young man named Tatsumi Karasawa suddenly rises in the criminal world of Shinjuku, Tokyo, and becomes the leader of a group of amateurs who show no reluctance to face police and gangs alike. His successes in the Tokyo underground make a chief and a yakuza boss plot a conspiracy to eliminate him.

Black Rain

Two New York cops get involved in a gang war between members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. They arrest one of their killers and are ordered to escort him back to Japan. However, in Japan he manages to escape, and as they try to track him down, they get deeper and deeper into the Japanese Mafia scene and they have to learn that they can only win by playing the game—the Japanese way.

Wasabi

Hubert is a French policeman with very sharp methods. After being forced to take 2 months off by his boss, who doesn't share his view on working methods, he goes back to Japan, where he used to work 19 years ago, to settle the probate of his girlfriend who left him shortly after marriage without a trace.

Kill or Be Killed

When Yakuza decides to take avenge his brother, the war shall begin.

AKP: Job 27

A Yakuza hitman travels to North America for his 27th job, only to find lingering memories of lost love through a chance encounter with a beautiful prostitute.

Enlisted Yakuza

It is the third film in the Gokudo series. In this episode, set in 1937, the main character of the series gang leader Shimamura is drafted into the military and fight in China.

Dochinpira 2

The Haozakura-kai continues to relentlessly tail Jin every day, but now, a yakuza from the Enshin-gumi, Mizuno Tetsuo, appears. Just as they share a cup of sake as blood brothers, an assassin from the Tendo-gumi attacks and kills Mizuno, leaving behind his only sister, Rei. This is where Jin's days of agony begins, entrusted with Rei.

Overkill

A Tokyo cop is sent to Los Angeles to help an LAPD detective break up a yakuza ring operating in the city.

Motorpsycho!

A vengeful veterinarian and a grieving widow join forces to track down violent bikers after they commit heinous acts against their loved ones.

Brother

A Japanese Yakuza gangster's deadly existence in his homeland gets him exiled to Los Angeles, where he is taken in by his little brother and his brother's gang. Original Title: ブラザー

The Pinkie

Since they were both five, Ryosuke has been stalked by Momoko - the ugliest girl in the village. Her love for Ryosuke is so boundless that she has her face surgically altered to suit his taste - but still he wants nothing to do with her. Ryosuke goes in for fleeting romance - for example, with the girlfriend of a gangster boss. But when he finds out about their affair, he has Ryosuke's little finger hacked off. Magically, the finger falls into Momoko's hands, and she uses it to clone Ryosuke, so she can finally have him (or almost him) for herself. And this is just the first five minutes of Lisa Takeba's short-but-powerful feature debut. Just like in her previous short films, the director - who cut her teeth in the advertising world and as the writer of a video game - throws a lot of genres and techniques into the mix: from science fiction to gangster films, from hospital eroticism to animation. Hectic and absurd, but with its heart in the right place. © IFFR

Mondo Yakuza

Ichiro Kataki, a violent Yakuza gang member travels to Melbourne, Australia after his beloved sister Yuko is brutally murdered by a group of criminals. Hell bent on vengeance he teams up with Cassidy Arizona, a lady of the night with a vendetta of her own.

Woman's Police: Appointment with Danger

Kagari (Akira Kobayashi), a scout and overseer of Ginza bar hostesses, receives an urgent phone call from Sawako, a hostess at the bar Rie, and rushes to Tokyo International Airport to meet her. When he arrives she is gone. At the bar he learns that Tabuchi, a steady customer, had been quite friendly with Sawako and may know something. Tabuchi claims he knows nothing and Kagari lets the matter drop. Over time Kagari learns from Takijima, a businessman, that Sawako is in a hospital in Yokohama. Takijima explains that he found her in Singapore working as a street girl and brought her back to Japan. Sawako had lost her memory after being subjected to narcotics. Kagari swears to find the person responsible.

Whipmaster: Ballad of Murder

Ryotatsu, the wayward Priest blinded by Shinkai, the Wicked Priest, has his own story in this ultra-violent tale from the era of the Meiji Reconstruction. When a woman leaves her blind son at the Monastery, Ryotatsu is forced to teach the boy how to cope as a blind person in old Japan. When he takes the child with him on the road to find the boy's mother, they run afoul of not only yakuza gangsters, but some corrupt army officers have been trying to sway public opinion against the Satsuma rebels by posing as members of Saigo Takamori's group. It's a bloody mistake for them to underestimate the strength of the Blind Priest, and he'll make them pay with their lives!

Japan's Most Chivalrous

Dolls

Dolls takes puppeteering as its overriding motif, which relates thematically to the action provided by the live characters. Chief among those tales is the story of Matsumoto and Sawako, a young couple whose relationship is about to be broken apart by the former's parents, who have insisted their son take part in an arranged marriage to his boss' daughter.

The Great Okinawa Yakuza War

Chiba, looking gnarly, and acting as animalistic as ever, stars alongside Matsukata as violent gangsters battling their way through fight after bloody fight with rival yakuza on the streets of Okinawa.