Yoshitaro Nomura's The Chase (1957) is among the lesser-known titles, but it's one of the highlights. Two Tokyo cops go to a provincial town to stake out the house of a young married woman in the hope that her fugitive ex-lover will turn up. He does, but not before one of the cops has fallen in love with the woman. A melancholy, beautifully composed film in black and white Scope, it depicts everyday life in subtle, finespun touches.

A small town is also the setting for maverick director Sogo Ishii's oneiric thriller Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), a Freudian fable about a virginal bus conductor who falls in love with a serial killer. Tadanobu Asano, heartthrob of Japan's independent film scene, is disturbingly effective as the remote homme fatal.

Not all is roses. A Night in the Nude (1993), by manga-artist-turned-director Takashi Ishii (who got his start making soft porn), is a shapeless mess, an absurdist Grand Guignol piece that anticlimaxes in a dismal attempt to out-gore Psycho's shower scene. To boot, it's atrociously homophobic—a gaggle of hysterical queers rush in every reel or so to beat everyone up.

Ishii's dippy twaddle is more than compensated for by the two marvelous Kurosawa films. Both star the great Toshiro Mifune and are principally concerned with the relationship between two men: in Drunken Angel, an alcoholic slum doctor and a wounded hoodlum; in High and Low, an industrialist and the criminal who attempted to kidnap his son. Both are dense, Dostoyevskian exercises, more breathtaking than the director's later, grandiose historical pageants. High and Low is his most accomplished contemporary film. Whatever the company, Kurosawa remains emperor.