The best Shinichirô Mikami’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Shinichirô Mikami’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Shinichirô Mikami.
An Autumn Afternoon
8/10
Shuhei Hirayama is a widower with a 24-year-old daughter. Gradually, he comes to realize that she should not be obliged to look after him for the rest of his life, so he arranges a marriage for her.
Pale Flower
7.7/10
Muraki, a hardboiled Yakuza gangster, has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for murder. Revisiting his old gambling haunts, he meets Saeko, a striking young upper-class woman who is out seeking thrills, and whose presence adds spice to the staid masculine underworld rituals. Muraki becomes her mentor while simultaneously coping with the shifts of power that have affected the gangs while he was interred. When he notices a rogue, drug-addicted young punk hanging around the gambling dens, he realizes that Saeko's insatiable lust for intense pleasures may be leading her to self-destruction.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity
7.4/10
In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza...
Late Autumn
7.9/10
A mother gets help from her late husband's three friends in order to get her daughter married to a well-settled man.
G.I. Samurai
6.4/10
A squadron of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers find themselves transported through time to their country's warring states era, when rival samurai clans were battling to become the supreme Shogun.
Big Time Gambling Boss
7.6/10
Tokyo, 1934. The boss of the clan that controls gambling agonizes and some of his followers propose to Nakai to take his place, but he refuses the offer and suggests they choose Matsuda, who is in prison. Other clan members oppose and Ishido is elected. When Matsuda is freed, he doesn't accept this decision.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Police Tactics
7.3/10
As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic games, the cops start to crack down on the gangs, under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima.
Yakuza Ladies: The Final Battle
6.4/10
A Yakuza boss's wife and the widow of a rival crime syndicate's murdered leader bond over a common purpose: to seek vengeance.
Dangerous Trade in Kobe
6.7/10
Using a lesser mobster as bait a government agent infiltrates a narcotics-smuggling gang to try to capture the boss. But his survival has a price.
Nomugi Pass
7.3/10
The story of the silk industry and the young girls who worked as silk spinners in the early 1900s in Japan. The silk mills were located in Okaya which lies just beyond the Nomugi Pass. The women and girls worked in a hot, humid atmosphere without rest, and endured those conditions and sexual harassment to earn money for their poor families. Across the ocean, it was the great depression in America.
August without Emperor
6.8/10
Taking the Chilean coup as an example, a group of young officers plan to overthrow the Japanese government on V-J Day. They aim to abolish the post-war constitution, restore the national army and revive the traditional spirit of Japan. As the conspiracy is exposed, the coup squadrons are wiped out one by one. The remaining squadron takes over a night train bound for Tokyo.
I Lived, But...
7.5/10
An extremely lovely tribute to Ozu, on the 20th anniversary of his death. It uses a combination of footage from vintage films and new material (both interviews and Ozu-related locations) shot by Ozu's long-time camera-man (who came out of retirement to work on this). Surprisingly (or perhaps not), it focuses less on Ozu's accomplishments as a film-maker than on his impact on the lives of the people he worked with..
The Yakuza Code Still Lives
7.1/10
After spending eight years in prison for murder, Hiroshi leaves his yakuza family to start a new life as a labor racketeer.
The Homeless
5.5/10
The Homeless is a picaresque tale in the truest sense of the word. Two inmates are simultaneously released from jail, but go their separate ways, only to cross paths again in the nearest brothel. There they make the acquaintance of a would-be prostitute with a childlike mind and serious problems with the yakuza. They help her escape from the mob-infested cathouse and decide to guide her on her quest for sunken contraband somewhere off the coast, whose location only she knows, but which the yakuza are very eager to learn about. It is a remake of the French film The Last Adventure (1967).
Blood Is Dry
7.1/10
An employee in an assurance company threatens to commit suicide when management announces a massive layoff, the company uses this threat to its own advantage by turning the incident into an advertising campaign. With the success of the campaign, however, he is no longer a desperate man pointing a gun to his head, but a potential leader who wishes to take advantage of his failed suicide.
Father of the Kamikaze
7.1/10
Vice Admiral Takajiro Ohnishi could see that Japan's defeat in WWII was inevitable. He came to realize that the only way to force a negotiated solution was to convince the Americans that invading Japan would cause massive casualties on both sides. The cold logic of suicide attacks, where one man and one plane could kill hundreds, seemed the only solution. In one of the cruel ironies of fate, Ohnishi actually succeeded; he convinced the Americans that invading Japan would be too costly in lives. But what he could not foresee was that America had another way of ending the war.
Destroyer Yukikaze
Yutaro Kida, a worker at the Sasebo Naval Arsenal, volunteers for the navy but finds himself a cook's mate in the galley of a gunboat. But his dream is eventually realized when he is transferred to the new and powerful destroyer Yukikaze which he helped to build. When the Pacific War breaks out Yukikaze performs valiantly in the South Pacific, and while on shore leave, Kida meets and falls in love with Yukiko, younger sister of his commander.
Karafuto 1945 Summer
7.1/10
The film is set in Karafuto after the radio broadcast of the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War. On August 15, 1945, Soviet forces invaded Karafuto. On August 20, the postal telegraph office in Maoka suspended operations and nine of the twelve telephone operators committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide while the city was being invaded.
Yokosuka Navy Prison
6.3/10
When a rebellious roughneck enlists in the Navy and goes on a rampage against his superiors, he is sent to the Yokosuka Naval Prison.
The Cross of Vengeance
Film with Junko Miyazono.
