Coming out of jail and hoping for a quiet life, Yokohama yakuza has to take the lead of his gang after the death of his boss. His small group is is taken in a crossfire between a big yakuza group from Osaka at war with the Tokyo alliance for the control of the city. He tries to keep to the old yakuza code but he is no match for the new thugs who live and fight without honor.

This is the story of a chief inspector in the anti-narcotics unit who holds true to his beliefs as a police officer. He puts everything on the line to crack down on drugs and bring drug traffickers to justice. How will our hero resolve this “bursting point” crisis?

(Source: thefilmcatalogue.com)

Fukaku Yusuke is a stage actor and director. He is married to Oto, who works as a playwright. They have a happy marriage, but Oto suddenly disappears and leaves behind a secret.

Two years later, Yusuke takes the director job at a theater festival. So he heads to Hiroshima, driving his car. There, he meets his exclusive chauffeur Misaki, who doesn't talk much. While spending time with her, Yusuke learns things which he has ignored.

Susumu Okada (Gaku Hamada) is an ordinary man who works cleaning a building. Susumu’s colleague asks Susumu to be a cupid of love between himself and cafe worker Yuka (Aimi Satsukawa). When Susumu goes to the cafe where Yuka works...

The more power he desires, the darker his world becomes. Hae Woong, an assembly member candidate, is taken out of the running because he became a thorn in the side of a local bigwig, Soon Tae. Hounded by loan sharks, due to defaulting a campaign loan, he decides to get his hands dirty. He steals classified government’s information about an urban development plan and obtains the help of a local gang leader, Pil Do, by promising hefty real estate profit. Now Hae Woong re-enters the race and tries to take revenge on Soon Tae. Unbeknownst to him, his messy journey through politics has only just begun.

This digital featurette, not quite a companion piece to Tropical Malady but certainly related to it, shows Joe operating at the height of his formalist powers. One of the things I’ve valued about Weerasethakul’s work since Mysterious Object at Noon is his commitment to exploring the traditions of avant-garde cinema while taking those idioms into uncharted territory. While some works by Joe have displayed an interest in bending the strategies of Andy Warhol and Bruce Baillie to the needs of Thai folklore and narrative gamesmanship, Worldly Desires takes a more structural approach. However this piece bears little resemblance to structural film as we usually think of it; if there are specific touchstones for Worldly Desires in film history, they would be those “other” structuralists, so wonky and off the beaten track as to thwart easy categorization. Like Morgan Fisher’s early film projects, Worldly Desires is a documentation of the filmmaking process. Within a single expansive jungle location, portions of a Thai soap opera are being filmed by day, and a music video is being made by night.We watch at a significant remove, behind the camera and lighting crews. Multiple views display random bits of business on the periphery, like the craft services table or a playback monitor. However, the stringent day / night rhythmic structure breaks down in the end, the night song (about a woman wondering if she’ll be as lucky in love as her mom was — an Electra Complex with a disco beat) eventually bleeding into the daytime shoot. But more significantly, the relatively austere TV production, whose melodramatic dialogue is mostly heard in disconnected snippets, is contrapuntally offset by the swelling musical numbers. They break up the video, with the unexpected jolt of pure pleasure. Although these sequences recall the musical interludes in certain of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, they’re shot in the mode of early Hou Hsiao-hsien, dancing girls reduced to tiny figures in a wide expanse, itself engulfed within an intractable master-shot. The rigor / comedy handoff recalls aspects of Owen Land’s work, but perhaps more importantly, Joe’s visual and conceptual approach displays a sensitivity to the unique qualities of the jungle landscape, a willingness to let the “location” become the subject of the piece. Worldly Desires is a landscape film, one that brings that most mythologically burdened aspect of Tropical Malady — its deep, dark thicket of the soul — and allows it to grow wild and overtake the image.

Kuga Kazuyuki aspires to become an actor. He auditions for the lead role in a theater company's next work. Among the 300 people who take part in that audition, only seven people are selected for a final audition round. Kazuyuki is among the final seven participants. These seven people then travel to a snowy mountain villa and stay there for four days to take the final audition. By the director's orders, all contact with the outside world is not allowed. Soon, the participants begin to disappear one by one.

Gota is an unpopular scriptwriter. He has been married to Chika for 10 years and they have a daughter Aki. Their marriage life is not very good. Gota tries to make his relationship with Chika better, but Chika looks down on him for not being able to earn money. One day, Gota has a chance to travel to Kagawa Prefecture to write a screenplay. He persuades Chika and Aki to go with him to Kagawa Prefecture, but he faces an unexpected case.