Makoto Ishihara

Launched in 2011 as a sister group to girl band behemoth AKB48, the Osaka-based NMB48 has become a musical force itself. With a string of No.1 hit singles and albums, not to mention sell-out performances, NMB48 continues Japan’s pop-music phenomena. Director Funahashi Atsushi, whose documentary work has previously chronicled such harrowing events as the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, pulls back the curtain on the life and struggles of the band members and the workings of the idol-making industry.

When a new, smart and sweet Tokyo girl, Rumiko, starts at a rural elementary school, Akira finds himself smitten, like every other male pupil. Newcomer's popularity is contrasted with the less-tolerant treatment of scruffy Hideko, who, thanks to the arrival of a carnival freak-show in town, is nicknamed the Wolf Girl. Teachers and parents snootily consider the carny off-limits, but Akira is determined to find out whether Hideko really is a wolf girl.

In a Japanese school, 5 adolescent geeks join the new sport teacher and take up the challenge to take part in the synchronised swimming competition, in-spite of the mockeries of the real sportsmen.

After her brother is accused of murdering four people, his sister, desperate to prove his innocence, goes to a psychic for help. The price they ask, however, is far more than she expected, and the answers they give her are nothing she could ever have imagined. And what is the FBI doing investgating a murder in Japan?

Detective Kogoro Akechi is faced with a peculiar murder case involving forgeries of classic pornographic artworks.

Hatano is living as an insomniac freelance typesetter alone in his bayside apartment. One day, Aikawa, a high school classmate he hasn’t seen in over ten years, shows up on his doorstep bearing a bag of clams. Though he claims to be the director of a fast-growing trading company, Aikawa crashes on Hatano’s couch for days on end. When the sleeping pills he was offered produce a strange side effect, Hatano is slowly dragged into Aikawa’s con-artist lifestyle. Soon afterward, they cross paths with the representative of a big-name publishing company and Aikawa’s ultimate scam begins to unfold.

In 1923, in a cheap Tokyo rooming house, a languid young man named Goda was feeling bored with his life. One day while playing dress up with a woman’s wig and lipstick, he accidentally loosens a ceiling board in his closet. Climbing up, he discovers a dimly lit passageway under the roof leading to the resident’s other rooms. Soon he is scampering about like a ninja, making knotholes and moving ceiling boards for a better view. What he sees are the intimate acts - sadistic, criminal or vaguely mad - that reveal infinitely more about his fellow roomers than the various fronts they present to the world.