The best Naoto Takenaka’s crime movies

After being dumped by his fiancé, heartbroken Hong Kong police officer Fallon Zhu gains 200+ pounds. His superiors demote him to the job of escorting convicts to Japan. When a convict in his custody mysteriously dies, he must team up with citizen Thor to solve the mystery.

Steelhead is a Chinese laborer who comes to Japan hoping for a better life. Unable to find honest work and bullied into the shadows with his fellow Chinese illegal immigrants, he soon finds himself ascending as the boss of a black market mob. After providing a deadly service to a powerful Yakuza crime boss, Steelhead’s rise to mafia power spirals rapidly out of control as he’s given reign over the dangerous and lucrative Shinjuku district.

Accused of a murder he didn't commit, a prosecutor sets out on a mission to clear his name.

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.

Set in the Phillipines, Takashi Miike’s “The Guys from Paradise” weaves together the stories of several real-life criminal cases. Young up-and-coming salaryman Kohei Hayakawa is sent to Paradise prison on false drug charges, and assumes his lawyers will clear up this misunderstanding fairly quickly. However, he soon comes to the realization that his innocence means less than how much bribe money he’s able to come up with for his release. It becomes apparent that Kohei is going to have to get to know his fellow inmates a little better, as he’s obviously in this situation for the long haul; but meeting a female inmate from a nearby jail certainly makes his transition to the criminal life a little easier to take.

The story follows a trio of Japanese youths of Chinese descent who escape their semi-rural upbringing and relocate to Shinjuku, Tokyo, where they befriend a troubled Shanghai prostitute and fall foul of a local crime syndicate. Like many of Miike's works, the film examines the underbelly of respectable Japanese society and the problems of assimilation faced by non-ethnically Japanese people in Japan.

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.

Masamichi Toyama is a loyal husband with a bad gambling debt. Mobsters out for the money track him down, beating him and raping his wife. Desperate for revenge, he makes himself a sword and sets out to wreak havoc. When he meets the Gonin, a group of five female thieves, his luck only gets worse. Run, Sayuri, Shiho, Saki and Chihiro are fast-shooting, strong-arm women. Not only that, but they're more than prepared to take on an army of gangsters. Unfortunately for them, they stole the ring Masamichi wanted for his wife, and now he's more likely to hunt them than join their cause.

Seiji is a third generation "Gosei kai" gang member. He works to build up the group's strength. Meanwhile, a journalist investigates a case that occurred 19 years ago. He meets Hayato, Daisuke and Asami.

Shuichi Kushimori is a 17 year old high school student who lives happily with his mother and stepsister. One day, without warning, his estranged stepfather returns home from a long absence. He quickly falls into a circle of drinking and starts abusing his ex-wife and daughter. When he begins making sexual advances towards Shuichi’s stepsister, Shuichi is compelled to take matters into his own hands.

A beautiful mother and her two daughters run a bar in a town. They have a dream of becoming rich, reforming the building, and living as celebrities. With no chance of their dream coming true with just their everyday earnings, they had another face - blinding the elderly with their beauty, putting on insurance coverage and seeking to get rich quick by murdering. However, their scheme begins to collapse from one little mistake.

Osamu rescues a girl who was being chased by two punks and is soon mixed up with the Yakuza

Jiro is a Tokyo man who offers a stand-in service where he'll do "anything". A woman claiming to be from Fukuoka wants to be shown around Tokyo and see the sights. What Jiro doesn't know is that this woman isn't who she says she is. She's on the run from her Yakuza boyfriend, and Jiro is going to be unwittingly entwined in the situation.

An undercover narcotics officer is killed, and after his funeral some yakuza break into his apartment and rape his wife, Nami, while looking for the drugs they claim he stole from them. Afterwards Nami attempts to commit suicide, but after being rescued by a mysterious yakuza she decides to infiltrate the gang and get revenge.

Ayano, a middle-aged female director met Aoi, young attractive actor at the audition for her new film. Ayano soon felt something different in Aoi and the audition goes far beyond the moral.

Disaster befalls a village's inhabitants every 300 years. A popular self-styled magician named Naoko (Yukie Nakama) is summoned as a deity to rid the people of their anxiety. But there are many would-be deities there, each posing as a god. When a series of bizarre incidents occur, Naoko is cornered with a genius physicist (Hiroshi Abe) and Detective Yabe (Katsuhisa Namase). Do deities actually exist, or are they charlatans?