An anarchic send-up of B-movie clichés about an assassin whose failed attempt to kill a victim turns him into a target himself, this fractured film noir got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu Studios, simultaneously making him a counterculture hero and putting him out of work for a decade.

Nikkatsu icons Hideki Takahashi and Akira Kobayashi star as brothers who unite to avenge their yakuza father’s death 18 years earlier in this film made in the midst of Suzuki’s stylistic breakthrough, featuring a bold use of color.

In this surreal comic confection, a traditional naniwa-bushi singer moves to Prohibition-era San Francisco in search of Al Capone, whom he mistakenly believes is president, and hopes to impress him with his singing in order to popularize the art form in the States.

A 1960s riff on the opera Carmen (including a rock version of its famous aria “Habanera”), this picaresque tale sends its heroine from the countryside to Osaka and Tokyo in search of success as a singer.

While its bizarre camera movements and compositions provide a glimpse of the experimentation that took over in Suzuki’s later films, Eight Hours of Fear stands on its own as a gripping, eccentric adventure yarn.

One of Suzuki’s most personal and impassioned works, this darkly comic film is the story of Kiroku, a high-school student who lusts after the pure, Catholic daughter of the family with whom he boards.

Part social-realist drama, part sadomasochistic trash opera, Gate of Flesh paints a dog-eat-dog portrait of postwar Tokyo centered on a gang of tough prostitutes working out of a bombed-out building.

Reality, fantasy, life, and the afterlife blend in this hallucinatory adaptation of work by the Taisho-era writer Kyoka Izumi, when a mysterious woman invites a playwright to the city of Kanazawa for a romantic rendezvous.

Based on a book by Taiko Hirabayashi, one of Japan’s most famous female novelists, Kanto Wanderer puts a Suzukian spin on the classic yakuza movie conflict between giri (duty) and ninjo (humanity).

In this stylish film noir, a trombonist goes on an all-night bender after his wife disappears during their honeymoon and must piece together a night he can’t remember when he returns home to find her corpse in their apartment.

When Satoru Ogura suggested that Suzuki make a follow-up to his most notorious film, Branded to Kill, the result was this eye-popping action extravaganza about a female assassin battling her way to the top of her guild, which is less a sequel than a compact retrospective of Suzuki’s style and themes.

Rooted in Japanese folklore, studded with tunes that range from operetta to hip-hop, and set in a fantastical Edo period of the imagination, Princess Raccoon shows Suzuki at his most kindhearted and whimsical.

A businessman vanishes upon his return from an overseas trip, and his daughter hires a reporter to help find him. This proto–Breaking Bad moves to an energetic pulp-fiction beat all the way to its spectacular conflagration of an ending.

One of Suzuki’s darkest urban tales features the nihilistic Katiri, a reporter so ambitiously amoral that he’ll sell out anyone—including his partner and the drug dealer he’s sleeping with—to get a scoop.

Yumiko Nogawa, one of Suzuki’s favorite actresses, gives perhaps her most ferocious performance in this scathing portrayal of Japanese militarism during the lead-up to World War II that puts the sex and violence of the B-movie arena to philosophical use.

Nearly a decade after being fired by Nikkatsu Studios, Suzuki returned with this titillating tale about a model turned professional golfer and, subsequently, the victim of a deranged fan’s blackmail scheme.

Set in the 1930s, Tattooed Life is the story of two brothers—one a yakuza, the other an art student—on the run and the first film to earn Suzuki a warning from his Nikkatsu bosses about “going too far.”

Tasked with making a vehicle for actor-singer Tetsuya Watari to croon the title song, Suzuki concocted this crazy yarn about a reformed yakuza on the run from his former comrades featuring goofy musical numbers and over-the-top fight scenes.

In his second collaboration with Suzuki, Joe Shishido rampages through frames filled with lurid colors, striking compositions, and boldly theatrical effects, playing a disgraced ex-cop pitting two yakuza gangs against each other to avenge the death of a fellow officer.

Made 10 years after its predecessor, the final film in the Taisho Trilogy spins a fantastical tale from the life of a historical figure, Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), an artist known as much for his paintings of beautiful women as for his bohemian lifestyle.

Taking its title from a recording of violin music by Pablo de Sarasate, Zigeunerweisen is a metaphysical ghost story involving love triangles, doppelgängers, and a blurred line between the worlds of the living and the dead.