Based on a 1956 television feature on Japan’s national network, NHK, this is one of Uchida’s rarest films. A socially conscious drama with a contemporary backdrop, Dotanba focuses on the attempts to rescue a group of trapped miners. The title is a figure of speech — (essentially “last minute” or “eleventh hour”) — that refers to a situation of peril. The film boasts a script co-written by Uchida and Akira Kurosawa’s frequent screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto, and stars Kurosawa’s frequent star Takashi Shimura.

Mike Hama is a private investigator who has been reduced to combing the mean streets of the Yokohama waterfront on a borrowed bicycle.

A hard working salaryman takes off five days from his busy job and sets off with his wife and two children to visit his parents in his hometown for the 1991 new year holidays. He decides that they will go by car to save on expenses. Unfortunately, the long drive from Tokyo to his hometown becomes a much longer journey than expected due to traffic, sickness and other misfortunes and by the time they arrive three days later, they only have time for a short but happy visit.

Two Japanese scientists, Ushioda and Ochi, develop a bond with their sled dogs while on an expedition in Antarctica. Ushioda and Ochi eventually leave Antarctica, only to return to search for the dogs inadvertently marooned there.

A working class young man, Tetsuo, who distrusts all rich people, falls in love with a girl, Chika, from an affluent family. He has a difficult time, but love survives despite the problems.

A large earthquake hits Tokyo, which was predicted by a seismologist but was ignored.

Japanese girl loses her beloved dog while moving with her family. The rest of the TV series is about the girl and the dog trying to find each other.

The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation.

A group of ultra-right military prepares a coup d'etat, code-named August Without the Emperor, with the goal of establishing a military dictatorship.

In a melancholic seaside town, the bodies of two lovers who committed double suicide are found on the shore. A local reporter and the dead woman's pimp begin to investigate and find out that something very suspicious is going on.

Kyoko met Tetsu during her trip to San Francisco. Soon they fell in love but getting married was not in his mind. They were to meet again back in Tokyo but Tetsu didn't turn up.

Sen Rikyu is a ceremonial tea master who advises warlord Hideyoshi in sixteenth-century feudal Japan. His daughter, the beautiful Lady Ogin, has an unrequited love for Lord Ukon, who has angered Hideyoshi by becoming a Christian convert. Ogin's father Rikyu also displeases Hideyoshi by opposing the warlord's plan to invade China and Korea. When the animalistic Hideyoshi is rejected by Ogin, he threatens her and her father with arrest and worse.

UFOs appear on Earth, and people who actually see them suddenly find that their blood has turned blue. Soon panic and hysteria result in the new "blue-bloods" being persecuted by the rest of mankind, and eventually certain all-too-familiar measures begin to be taken against them.

Follows the life of the famous classical printmaker, Utamaro Kitagawa, set during the time when Utamaro is commissioned to produce pornographic woodblocks.

Japanese crime film.

A tough police detective is falsely accused of corruption, and goes on the run to clear his name. He is assisted by the beautiful daughter of a rich man.

The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and deceptiveness of the outside world, when her grandmother dies.

The cat of the title roams around the house of a poor schoolteacher in the late 19th century, observing the goings-on of the teacher and his neighbors.

Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.

American private-eye Harry Kilmer returns to Japan to rescue a friend's kidnapped daughter from the clutches of the Yakuza.

A bad ESP syndicate is planning to kill world leaders through mental telepathy. The good guys are a top secret group called ESPY and they're in charge of stopping the killer psychics.

A strikingly beautiful young woman is raised from birth to be a deadly instrument of revenge against the swindlers who destroyed her family.

Five warriors challenge Ogami to duels. Each holds a part of information needed to complete the assassination of a mad clan leader.

Zatoichi returns to his home village for the first time in over ten years to find much has changed and that corruption abounds.

The film depicts the youth of Kinzo, a heretic painter who worked in Tosa during the late Edo period, and the hurricane-like inner side of his life.

Two Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and to locate their mentor.

Near a remote Buddhist monastery, a young man falls in love with his sister and gets her pregnant. After a monk finds out, the young man becomes an assistant to a master sculptor, only to proceed to complicate matters with his affairs.

Although not a pure yakuza film, it does have quite a few of the genre's elements and, more importantly, it truly gets inside the sociopathic soul that serves as fertile ground for the ever-burgeoning yakuza ranks.

Kitagawa is an engineer charged with construction of a gigantic tunnel through the Japan Alps for the transportation of equipment in the building of the massive Kurobe Dam. The tunnel crosses an earthquake fault and Kitagawa is beleaguered not only by cave-ins and flooding, but by strife between management and the workers's union. Adding to Kitagawa's stress is the knowledge that as his attention is pulled inexorably toward the tunnel construction, his youngest daughter is dying from leukemia.

Suzuko, a woman in her twenties who has a brother with political problems (due to communist reprisals), lives for over five years in a love affair with Tate who's a young lieutenant in the Army, ultimately becoming a right-wing fundamentalist revolutionary. She marries another man, one totally dedicated to the rigorous practices of Noh theatre, in an arranged marriage, but the bond that connects her with Tate is too strong.

When a crew of scientists returns from Mars with a sample of the space spores that contaminated their ship, the sample escapes and grows into an enormous, rampaging beaked beast.

Takamura, poet and sculptor, is married to Chieko, who also has artistic desires. However, she is becoming increasingly aware that she can not match her husband's work.

A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality.

A young woman begins murdering all those responsible for her ailing father's condition. Because the girl is so outwardly sweet and innocent, the detective looking into the deaths does not suspect her.

Remake of Kurosawa's films Sanshiro Sugata and Sanshiro Sugata part 2. A young man, Sanshiro Sugata, troubled by personal problems, takes up judo. His teacher, Shogoro Yano, is a devout man who has aroused the enmity of the local practitioners of jujitsu, the older and more accepted of the two sports. Sugata uses his newly learned prowess to gain a measure of respect from others; however, Shogoro insists that the sport has a spiritual side, a lesson Sugata has yet to learn. Eventually, in hand-to-hand combat with the father of a young woman he loves, he comes to understand the true meaning of judo.

The legendary samurai Sasuke Sarutobi gets caught in a web of political intrigue, deception and espionage during the early 17th century.

In 1863, when Americans warships approach Japan, a enigmatic ronin becomes a important figure in a complex game of power between the Shogunate and the empire.

An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble.

In a sterile building complex, a woman gains a sense of altruism after encountering a street beggar and his blind orphan, much to her husband's disapproval.

An ambitious scholar becomes the ambassador of Sarkan, a southeast Asian country where civil war is brewing.

Van Hekken, an old gangster, arrives in Tokyo to direct a bank hold-up in order to get a very valuable diamond.

During the middle of the Kanei Period (1624-1644) Japan was in the early stages of its most peaceful era. This left a large number of unemployed samurai with nothing to do, and their morale suffered. In order to raise their spirits, the Shogun's Chief Advisor suggests that they hold a "Festival of Swordsmen" in the Shogun's presence. Problems arise when some of the martial artists bring their personal grudges to the competition. When Busshi Shirogoro (OTOMO) meets the daughter of the late Lord SANADA Yukimura sparks fly as she tries to use the competition to carry out her vengeance against Shogun Iemitsu.

A French actress filming an anti-war film in Hiroshima has an affair with a married Japanese architect as they share their differing perspectives on war.

Junai Monogatari is about two poor youths, Mitsuko and Kando, rebelling against society in various ways, who are desperately trying to be together despite tortuous circumstances.

Black comedy in which the various characters an honest young tax collector encounters, as he tries to enforce the law, present a scathing portrait of post WWII corruption, immorality, poverty, insanity, and the fear of atomic war.

A group of Okinawan high school girls are drafted as nurses during the American invasion of the island. As the enemy army advances further, the situation for the girls becomes increasingly desperate as food and shelter run out and the number of injured climbs, leading to the film's tragic finale.

Brilliant and extremely realistic retelling of the day in Hiroshima that the bomb dropped and following days.

Just before the end of the war, Japanese soldier Kitani is released from prison, having served his term for theft. Told in flashback, viewers learn about Kitani's past and reasons behind his prison sentence.

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.

The hero Saburo (Okada Eiji) is obstructed by a series of events from meeting Keiko (Kuga Yoshiko), his fiancee.

Keiko Yukawa is a former prostitute and the newest inmate at White Lily, a female rehabilitation facility.