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Juro Kara is a Japanese avant-garde playwright, theatre director, author, actor, and songwriter. He was at the forefront of the Angura (“underground”) theatre movement in Japan, while as an actor, he cooperated with some of the biggest names of the Japanese movie industry, including Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, Shuji Terayama, Toshio Matsumoto and Koji Wakamatsu. As a director, however, he only came up with one title, co-produced by Atg “Sea of Genkai”, an unusual type of yakuza film that focuses intently on the treatment of Korean women in the hands of the Japanese.

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The movie begins with a young man causing a ruckus on a high traffic street, until an older man takes him under his wing. The young man is named Taguchi and seems to have no one in his life, which is why he almost immediately becomes...

Sometimes regarded as not only among Gosha Hideo’s finest films but among the finest yakuza films ever made, Violent Streets is a brutal, gripping, kinetic action yarn in which legendary gangster-turned-actor Noboru Ando plays Egawa, a retired yakuza underboss, now nightclub owner, who gets pulled back into the life when his old comrades demand control of his club. Meanwhile, a gang war quietly roiling behind the scenes erupts into open violence in response to a high-profile kidnapping, lending unimaginably high stakes to Egawa’s reemergence onto the yakuza scene. The result is a kinetic and stylish explosion of deception, mayhem, and death that leaves no one safe—and a masterpiece of 1970’s yakuza cinema, a pulpy, pungent thriller.

Violent Streets is available on Blu-ray and Digital on May 23.

Enter for your chance to win a Blu-ray of Violent Streets, courtesy of Film Movement. Five (5) winners will be selected at random.

The beginning of the 1970s marked a critical period for the Japanese film industry, as it finally realized it had to come to terms with a changing audience that was more than willing to switch to foreign productions or the television set if their demands were not met. It was also the start of an incredibly creative period in mainstream cinema, with many directors suddenly concentrating on other genres or finally experiencing a kind of freedom they felt they had been denied before. With Kinji Fukasaku’s highly successful “Battles Without Honor and Humanity”-series becoming a new milestone within the Japanese gangster film, many wanted to have their piece of the success. Having collected experiences in many genres besides chanbara, which he still stayed somewhat faithful to in the coming decade, director Hideo Gosha turned to the yakuza genre too with features such as his 1974 effort “Violent City”, which even stars Bunta Sugawara,...

Street Mobster (1972) will be available on Blu-ray August 7th from Arrow Video

A pivotal work in the yakuza movie genre and in the career of director Kinji Fukasaku, Street Mobster presents an abrasive portrait of the rise and fall of a reckless street punk caught in the crossfire of a bloody turf war raging in the mean streets of Kawazaki.

When Okita Isamu re-emerges onto the mean streets of Kawazaki after five years in prison for a string of brutal crimes, he comes face to face with prostitute Kinuyo, who immediately pinpoints him as one of the participants in her brutal sexual assault years earlier that left her shell-shocked and consigned to the life of a sex worker. While the two outcasts form an unlikely bond, Okita returns to his criminal ways. He is approached by veteran gangster Kizaki, who encourages him to round up a group of local chinpira...