The best Kôichi Ueda’s comedy movies

A young woman who is prone to romantic dreams involving her supervisor time-travels from 1986 to 2001 and becomes involved with a private investigator who is working on a divorce case and is having his own marital difficulties.

A bored Japanese accountant sees a beautiful woman in the window of a ballroom dance studio. He secretly starts taking dancing lessons to be near her, and then over time discovers how much he loves ballroom dancing. His wife, meanwhile, has hired a private detective to find out why he has started coming home late smelling of perfume.

Beat Takeshi lives the busy and sometimes surreal life of a showbiz celebrity. One day he meets his blond lookalike named Kitano, a shy convenience store cashier, who, still an unknown actor, is waiting for his big break. After their paths cross, Kitano seems to begin hallucinating about becoming Beat.

Ryoko Itakura is a government tax agent who has just landed a big promotion. Her first assignment is to catch wheeler-dealer Hideki Gondo. She has a tough job, since in Japan tax evasion is an art and Gondo is, in effect, Rembrandt.

A rock band writes a song called "Fish Story" based on a sentence from a badly translated novel by a quack translator. The song exceeds the boundaries of space and time and ties people and their stories together. Thirty-seven years go by, and the song strikes a comet and saves the Earth from total destruction.

Constantly on the run from a vicious loan shark, two small-time con artists, Take and Tetsu, plan their biggest and most complex con yet in order to get revenge and retire from a life of crime. However, things get complicated when they cross paths with Mahiro, a young woman that Take inadvertently orphaned during a job gone awry years ago. Seeing Mahiro down on her luck, Take tries to relieve his guilt by taking her on as a partner, while hiding his true identity. But as his plan unfolds, Take discovers that he isn't the only one with a secret.

Set in Japan during the bubble era, this unique home comedy cheerfully and humorously depicts the daily life of a strange family that works together to accumulate a small amount of money, while mixing irony and satire.

Ryoko Itakura returns as the government tax agent willing to tackle the toughest cases. This time she takes on a fanatical but lucrative religious cult run by a vile lecher.

Toho university hospital has established an outstanding coronary surgery team under the leadership of a up and coming, star, U.S. trained surgeon that specializes in the highly risky "Batista" procedure to shrink the size of enlarged hearts. Normally this procedure has only a 60% success rate, but "Team Batista" has achieved a run of 26 straight successes....when suddenly 3 patients in a row die on the operating table. Very disturbed, the lead surgeon requests an independent investigation. The hospital turns to Dr. Taguchi who is a specialist in psychosomatic disorders who is shocked to at the assignment because she knows nothing in particular about surgery. Assured, however, that this very lack of insider specialized knowledge is in fact the "objectivity" required, she diligently begins to investigate in her own polite, but persistent manner.

Wasao, an Akita dog in Aomori Prefecture that became famous as an ugly-yet-cute dog from a traveller's blog. Heartwarming drama starring Wasao himself turns part of the life of this former stray into an original story. Setsuko, who runs a grilled-squid shop in a fishing village at the foot of the Shirakami mountains, decides to take in a large dog with a long, unruly fur that has shown up in town. She names the dog Wasao and showers it with affection, but Wasao at that time doesn't take to Setsuko.

A gas leak explosion at a yakuza hideout provides a shy nurse and a rental car clerk with the opportunity to take a briefcase full of money. A cross-country chase ensues.

Shun Nakahara directs this comic take on Sidney Lumet's 1957 classic Twelve Angry Men. Just as in that earlier work, this film takes place in a jury room and takes place in real time. The film opens as the jury is about to acquit the defendant -- a bar hostess who pushed her ex-husband path of an oncoming truck, supposedly in self-defense. Just as everyone seems to be in agreement over the woman's innocence, one bespectacled juror (Kazuyuki Aijima) -- no one is given names in this film -- voices second thoughts. Slowly, like an inversion of Henry Fonda's character in the earlier film, he sets about convincing his fellow jurors -- a group of nice folks who don't like thinking ill of people -- that the defendant is in fact a cold-blooded killer.

The story of the love game will not end here.