25 Best Japanese Movies of All Time

2 hours ago 6

Published Jun 26, 2026, 5:59 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2600 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
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There are too many great Japanese movies. That’s the intro. That’s all that can be introduced. Of course there are good Japanese movies. There are so many. So many are good. There are going to be plenty of great ones that won’t even get the equivalent of an honorable mention here, let alone a place in this whole top 25. That is just a consequence of there being too many good ones.

Well, not too many. It’s good to be spoiled for choice, in this instance. If you're after some of the absolute best of the best Japanese movies of all time, that’s what the following ranking intends to showcase. Most of these have stood the test of time, being older releases, and then a few others are included here because, even if they might only be a few years old, rather than a few decades, it’s looking likely that they will stand the test of time and stuff.

25 'Lady Snowblood' (1973)

Lady Snowblood is almost entirely about revenge and its consequences on an individual who really only exists to enact revenge. The main character, a woman named Yuki, never knew her family, since most of them were killed before she was born, and then, as soon as she was old enough to learn certain combat skills, she was trained to avenge the family she never knew.

You see that quest play out throughout the film, and then her origin story, so to speak, is covered by a series of flashbacks (also throughout the whole thing). Lady Snowblood is a pretty sad film, when you break it down that way, but it’s also quite visually striking and entertaining with some of the action it depicts. It’s certainly a classic, and a film that, had it not existed, neither might Kill Bill (especially the first volume of that revenge duology).

24 'Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris' (1999)

In a while, there is going to be an entire trilogy counted as a single film, which might be cheating, but also, films #2 and #3 there were always part of the main story. Okay, that trilogy is The Human Condition. Sorry to spoil, like, the seventh film in this ranking, but that’s what it is. And it’s a very different trilogy – or overall epic – to the Gamera Heisei trilogy, or whatever you want to call the three Gamera movies made in the 1990s.

Films #2 and #3 here were traditional sequels, but they effectively upped the stakes of the first movie (1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe) and improved upon that film’s already high quality. Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris is the best of the bunch, though it does have to be watched after the other two, for it to be properly appreciated. It’s a remarkable giant monster movie, and perhaps even the best Japanese kaiju movie not based around the king of the monsters, the Big G, who will be making a handful of appearances later on (do not worry; his time will come).

23 'Tora-san, Wish You Were Here' (2019)

Tora-san, Wish You Were Here is technically the 50th movie in a long-running series about a man who seems cursed to always be a bachelor. It was made to commemorate 50 years since the first film came out, and ended up being a Tora-san movie without Tora, as it’s really just about his legacy (and the idea he might be out there somewhere), owing to the main actor in the series, Kiyoshi Atsumi, passing away about two decades earlier.

That all sounds odd and like the kind of thing you need to devote dozens of hours to, before you can watch and appreciate it, and yes, it is. The emotional impact of a movie like this can only be felt if you’ve spent hours with the characters already, or, if you were a cinemagoer in Japan from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s, and you saw all the Tora-san movies, then you spent decades with these characters. If you're in either camp, then Tora-san, Wish You Were Here is perhaps the ultimate cinematic tearjerker, not to mention a perfect tribute to a legendary film series that deserves (much) wider recognition outside Japan.

22 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence' (1983)

A World War II movie that stars two iconic musicians (David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the latter also being the film’s composer), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is set in a prisoner of war camp, and is largely about a clash of cultures. The prisoners (mostly British) have a very different outlook on life from their captors, and then things become increasingly intense because of the strange dynamic that Bowie and Sakamoto’s characters come to have.

It is something of an odd film, and definitely not your standard World War II movie, but the parts of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence that really work prove difficult to shake. It’s a movie that looks and sounds stunning throughout, and it’s also ideal if you want something strange to watch as a “Christmas” movie, in the event you're sick of It’s a Wonderful Life and Gremlins, for whatever reason (okay, it’s barely a Christmas movie, but it can still qualify if you want it to).

21 'Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril' (1972)

Lone Wolf and Cub- Baby Cart in Peril still

If you like over-the-top action movies and have seen all the usual suspects, then all six Lone Wolf and Cub movies from the 1970s are worth watching. They all came out in pretty quick succession, and tell the story of a man named Ogami Itto, focusing on how he, accompanied by his infant son, enacts revenge on the people who wronged him and murdered his wife, back when he served as a Shogunate executioner.

Along the way, he clashes with – and sometimes helps – various other colorful characters, with there being a nice balance between telling an overarching story and having something of an episodic feel. Of the six main movies, the fourth, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril, might well be the best, or at least the most entertaining, as it wholeheartedly commits to being pulpy and kind of like an exploitation movie (in a good way) to an even greater extent than the other movies in the Lone Wolf and Cub series that it sits alongside.

20 'Kwaidan' (1964)

Tatsuya Nadakai in the cold in Masaki Kobayashi's 'Kwaidan' (1964)

Kwaidan is an epic horror movie, although if you don’t consider an anthology movie being worthy of getting called an epic, then it’s not. Way to poop on the party. But if you want to turn it down in that regard, it’s still one of the best anthology horror movies ever made, with four stories here based on Japanese folk tales that are all given sufficient room to breathe, and each proves genuinely unsettling in its own way.

Each story here could well be its own movie, but in Kwaidan, they're all given approximately three-quarters of an hour each. The result is something that feels surprisingly consistent, for an anthology film, and it also does a great job at replicating a particularly bad night of sleep. Like, one where you wake up at several different points on account of having several different nightmares. Still, at least they were all visually stunning nightmares, for whatever that might be worth.

19 'Sansho the Bailiff' (1954)

Perhaps one of the heaviest movies featured in this ranking, Sansho the Bailiff is a period drama about the members of a family who all get separated and have to endure more hardships than what they'd previously been used to. If you see it’s set hundreds of years ago, and expect some kind of samurai-related action or adventure elements, as a result, then you're probably going to be disappointed.

Well, you might not be disappointed if you're open to the sort of hard-hitting and startlingly realistic drama Sansho the Bailiff eventually is. It’s a rather slow film that still manages to be engrossing, and is, quite comfortably, the best film Kenji Mizoguchi ever directed. He’s a challenging filmmaker, as far as iconic Japanese directors go, with this particular film of his being the closest thing he’s got to a gateway movie, if you want to explore the filmography he built up over the course of several decades (with Sansho the Bailiff ultimately being one of his last movies).

18 'Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack' (2001)

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah_ Giant Monsters All-Out Attack - 2001 (10)

There are two very expected movies in the Godzilla series that will make an appearance in a little while, but they're not the only two films that should be here, since Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Now, this one’s kind of obscure overall, albeit not among fans of the Godzilla series, because it is kind of a fan-favorite. It’s more just the case that it has never fully crossed over to Western audiences the same way the two soon-to-be-mentioned Godzilla movies have.

Here, you’ve got one of the most ambitious and explosive giant monster movies of all time, in all honesty. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack puts more of a fantastical/mythological spin on its three titular characters, rather than leaning toward science fiction like the series generally does (well, Mothra is usually tied to the fantasy genre, but Godzilla and Ghidorah tend to feel like more sci-fi creatures). And then it also makes Ghidorah a hero for once, and has a particularly vicious iteration of Godzilla as the villain. It’s really thrilling, exciting, unique, and crowd-pleasing stuff, feeling more like a blockbuster than any of the American-produced Godzilla films to date.

17 'Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival' (1970)

Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival - 1970 (1)

Compared to the Tora-san film series, the Zatoichi series seems quite manageable… at least if you stick to the movies. The films starred Shintarō Katsu in the lead role, and he was also the star of a TV series that ran during the 1970s featuring the blind samurai having further adventures. But you can get a lot of Zatoichi without jumping into said series, since there were a total of 26 Zatoichi films starring Katsu.

It’s weird to say that the 21st movie in an overall series might well represent said series at its best, but that is the case here, as Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival is pretty much perfect. The first Zatoichi (which is a bit heavier, but ultimately very important for the character’s overall development) is still the ideal starting place, but if you only feel like skimming through the series, rather than being a completionist, Zatoichi Goes to the Fire Festival shouldn’t be skipped. It’s relentless and creative with its action, and has perhaps the most interesting cast of supporting characters (both good and evil) out of any Zatoichi film.

16 'Paprika' (2006)

It’s taken a bit of time to get to an anime film, but here you go. Here’s Paprika. Here’s one of the best anime films of all time, and it’s definitely not going to be the last one mentioned here, as an all-timer. You can sum up the premise of this one relatively easily, since it’s about a whole bunch of chaotic things that happen when a machine that lets therapists view their patients’ dreams is stolen, but as for summing up the story…

…That’s much harder to do. Paprika gets even more confounding and head-spinning than you'd expect, and you sort of just have to go along for the ride, rather than spending all your time worrying about “getting” everything. What a ride it is, though. The ride is enough, and what you can work out alongside feeling thrilled, wowed, and all shook up (mm, ooh, yeah, yeah-yay) makes this more than worth devoting your time and energy to.

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