The best Yūrei Yanagi’s drama movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Yūrei Yanagi’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 Yūrei Yanagi.
Fireworks
7.7/10
Detective Nishi is relieved from a stakeout to visit his sick wife in hospital. He is informed that she is terminally ill, and is advised to take her home. During his visit, a suspect shoots one detective dead and leaves Nishi's partner, Horibe, paralyzed. Nishi leaves the police force to spend time with his wife at home, and must find a way to pay off his debts to the yakuza.
Boiling Point
6.8/10
Masaki, a baseball player and gas-station attendant, gets into trouble with the local Yakuza and goes to Okinawa to get a gun to defend himself. There he meets Uehara, a tough gangster, who is in serious debt to the yakuza and planning revenge.
Achilles and the Tortoise
7.3/10
Machisu is a painter. He never had the success he thinks he is entitled to. Regardless of this, he always remains trying to be successful. His wife Sachiko keeps supporting him, despite all setbacks. Machisu, the only son of a rich collector, has a childs love for painting. Praise from a famous artist friend of his father inspires the young boy to dream of becoming a painter himself. s a young man, poor loner Machisu manages to attend art school with money earned from working. He is introduced to an unconventional world of bold creativity but he also gets his first bitter taste of harsh criticism from a dealer. Encouragement comes in the form of attractive clerk Sachiko who is convinced that she alone understands him. Marriage is soon followed by a daughter, as love and hope drive Machisu to commit even more deeply to his art ...
Asako in Ruby Shoes
6.5/10
Between Japan and Korea, Tokyo and Seoul, two people are living parallel lives: U-In is a civil servant who works in the City Hall recycling and rubbish collection department. Recycling is for life, as is his job. Aya is a student struggling to come to terms with adulthood while studying for her college entrance exams. Having recently lost her grandmother and admiring her grandfather's suicide by holding his breath, she begins to fantasize about taking her own life. For this she needs money. U-In is a loner, with a palpable indifference to his job and his life in general. He turns to the internet for companionship. Aya too turns to the internet, by posting herself on a personals site and changing her name to Asako. Somehow they meet both on and offline.
Ghost vs. Alien 03
4.1/10
A two-part feature directed separately by Shimizu and his colleague Keisuke Toyoshima. Unrelated to each other, both have a common goal: to bring ghosts and aliens together in pure, referential and absurdistic delirium, including neo-Nazi specters, zombie yakuzas, and nasty aliens.
Minazuki
6.3/10
Akira's wife walks out on him, leaving him to confide in his gangster brother-in-law. Using only a cryptic note as a clue the two brothers go on a road trip to find his wife. After a series of violent encounters with strangers, Akira meets a prostitute. The pair start a relationship. After Akira finds his wife, he questions whether he still wants to be with her.
Kaidan
6.1/10
Japan, 250 years ago. Soetsu is a moneylender who is killed by the cruel samurai Shinzaemon. His body is dumped in the Kasenega-Fuchi river. According to legend, all who drown in the river will never surface again. 20 Years later, Shinkichi, the handsome son of Shinzaemon, coincidentally meets Toyoshiga, the daughter of Soetsu. They fall in love. It is a doomed love, as the spirit of Soetsu is far from dead
Japanese Girls Never Die
6.1/10
While a gang of high school girls randomly beats lone men at night, the photo of a young woman who has been declared missing is used to design a template which is painted on each wall of a small suburban town.
Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment
6.6/10
There still stands a famous apartment building where such prominent manga artists as Tezuka Osamu, Shotaro Ishinomori and Fujio Akatsuka once lived, worked, and shared experiences.
Last Scene
6.5/10
Young film star Ken Mihara is about to fall from stardom. His rise as a celebrity is solely credited to his onscreen counterpart, Keiko, who recently announced her retirement from acting in order to get married. Feeling frustrated and helpless, Ken turns to alcohol as he begins to provoke fights, attempts to lure a girl into bed, and argues with his wife, who came to visit him at the studio. All she says is thank you and leaves Ken puzzled. Ken Mihara, once a budding young star, takes a job as an extra. Although he's past his prime, he still manages to infuse a young filmmaker with the motivation to pursue her dreams as a director.
Cold Bloom
6.3/10
Industrial Hitachi City is the location for this post-3.11 drama. Still recovering from the tsunami, Shiori receives news of her husband’s accidental death, which marks the start of a personal recovery that mirrors the town’s for Shiori as well as forgiveness of surviving coworker Takumi.
Good-bye Debussy
6.1/10
16-year-old Haruka lost the people she loved the most in a fire. Haruka is also physically and emotionally wounded from the fire, but she still dreams of becoming a pianist. She takes part in an upcoming competition. Inauspicious incidents then occur around her. Musical student Yosuke, who teaches piano to Haruka, tries to solve the case.
An Obsession
6.2/10
An Obsession is Aoyama's remake for the 1990s of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog ("Nora inu," 1949). The basic plot situation is the same: a cop, after losing his gun to a killer, sets out on a search for the criminal who in the end is all too disturbingly similar to the hero. Under Kurosawa's humanistic world view, Stray Dog presented the fundamentally shared nature of Japanese suffering amidst the Occupation and postwar poverty. An Obsession, however, is different.The film begins with a fin-de-siecle, apocalyptic sense of insanity which Kurosawa's humanism could never tolerate.
