The best Ryu Morioka’s drama movies

A male corpse is discovered with a smashed face and burned hands. Strangely, the cause of death is determined to be strangulation. When Detective Kaoru Utsumi attempts to corroborate the victim’s ex-wife’s alibi she discovers the mysterious neighbor and only a few small clues to help her disprove a seemingly "airtight" alibi...

Majime, an eccentric man in publishing company, who has unique ability of words, joins the team that will compile a new dictionary, ‘The Great Passage.’ In the eclectic team, he becomes immersed in the world of dictionaries. But the team is overwhelmed with problems. Will ‘The Great Passage’ ever be completed?

An outrageous collection of surreal, short attention span non-sequiturs largely revolving around Guitar Brother, his randy older sibling, and the pair's portly Caucasian brother.

The Isokaze, an Aegis-class escort vessel, sets sail on a routine training exercise, playing host to a platoon from the Fleet Training Group. No sooner is the Isokaze on open water, however, then the FTG reveal themselves to be terrorist stowaways who kill the ship's captain, send the rest of the crew overboard and take control of the vessel. The ship is carrying a secret biological weapon which the terrorists are now threatening to use to level Tokyo! Only a stowaway NCO, Sengoko (played by Sanada Hiroyuki from Ring and Twilight Samurai) is in a position to stop them - but does he really have what it takes to save the day? Playing like a cross between a sea-faring version of Top Gun and Die Hard, director Sakamoto Junji shows that it's not just Hollywood that can produce thrill-a-minute action spectaculars.

Based on a 2016 novel by Mana Sakura, “The Lowlife” shows the stories of three women who work in Japan’s adult video industry .

Co-pilot Kazuhiro is up for promotion, but before he can get his captain's wings he has to get through a flight evaluation, and things aren't exactly going his way. He just crashed and burned on a simulated flight test, and his friendly examiner has been replaced with the tough-as-nails Harada. On the same plane is cabin attendant Etsuko who's flying her first international flight and trying hard to not mess up. Elsewhere in the Happy Flight universe, staff are bustling back and forth with various problems and gripes - all to make this ordinary yet fateful flight a safe and happy one.

Jun is a university student. She meets high school student Haru. To Jun, Haru looks just like Sachiko who was the girlfriend of her now deceased father. Jun and Haru meet Tokio. Tokio is the grandson of Sachiko and they learn that Sachiko is now deceased. They find an open-reel tape from Sachiko's articles.

After 5 years in Tokyo, 5 part-time jobs, 5 boyfriends, Sawako's life is going nowhere. When her father gets seriously ill, she has to take over his struggling factory. Gradually she becomes the decider of her own life.

The story of the relationship between a college student whose relationship with her boyfriend is going nowhere and a bisexual medical artist who makes prosthetic body parts. Haru is a college student ignored by her boyfriend yet believes she is still in love with him. One day at a café, Haru meets Riko, a medical artist (prosthetist) who creates body parts in order to disguise clients’ missing pieces, lost due to accident or disease. Both were alone, but struck up an immediate friendship and closeness. Riko doesn't care about gender when it comes to relationships, and believes that love itself is the most important thing a human can achieve. Haru struggles in her life between friendship and a deeper relationship with Riko.

Mitsuko is 24, heavily pregnant and estranged from the American father of her child. Her parents believe she is happy and successful in America and are unaware that she has secretly returned to Tokyo. Making the biggest decisions on the slightest whim, she moves back into the tenement street where she lived as a child. The move changes lives, reignites old romances and creates a supportive circle of love that may be exactly what Mitsuko needs.

Protagonist Katsutoshi leaves town after a fight at work, and seeks refuge at a salon run by Seikichi, his Tokyo-based old friend, called "Tokyo Playboy Club." Meanwhile Eriko, the girlfriend of a waiter at the salon, finds herself forced to work there as a hostess after he gets into a bit of trouble. Then one day Katsutoshi brawls with a lowly neighborhood gangster, beating him to a pulp. The incident causes him, Seikichi, and Eriko to become embroiled in an even graver situation....

It was summer when a stranger from Tokyo arrived at “Iya”, where the riches of nature still abound. This young man, named Kudo, was willing to live his new, self-sufficient life. He was exhausted by city life, and believed this beautiful land would give him some rest. On the contrary, the reality was not as easy as he thought. There was a confliction between a local construction company and a group of nature conservationists. Farmers are trying to save their harvests from harmful animals such as deer and monkeys. People are fighting for their own purposes: to get their job, to save the environment, or to survive.

Up-and-coming manzai stand-up comedy duo Emi-Abi has lost consummate funny man Unno (a surprisingly touching Tomoya Maeno) to an accident, leaving conceited straight man Jitsudo (Ryu Morioka) to contend with his diminished career prospects as a bland, pretty face entertainer. Guided by his manager Natsumi (Haru Kuroki), who demonstrates stronger comedy chops than her own star, Jitsudo comes to learn the circumstances of his friend's passing, as well as the life-and-death stakes of a career in comedy. Demonstrating a careful balance of tone across tragedy and deadpan and gross-out humor, writer/director Kensaku Watanabe expands "Emi-Abi"'s hilarious premise into a strikingly assured meditation on artistic rivalry and self-actualization.

A man and a woman at the mercy of fate.

A Man With Style is a bittersweet family drama which has at its centre two fifty-something school friends – widower Junichi Miyata, a blue-collar worker and Sanada. Both are rather ordinary middle-aged men, far removed from any association with ‘style.’ Junichi Miyata is the more cantankerous and frustrated of the two in Ishii’s oeuvre. His wife died of cancer ten years ago, leaving him with an overriding memory of a silly but hilariously acted children’s song of bunnies she used to sing and two children who now, aged 18 and 19, hardly engage with him and are keen to move to university in Tokyo. He is short-tempered with them and nags them endlessly to no avail.

A married Japanese man living in the country agrees to meet with an ex-lover in Tokyo, leading him to question his life choices.