Best movies like Reveries

Keiko, whom everyone calls Mama, narrates her story: she's a hostess on the Ginza, 30, a widow. She describes life's vicious cycle: acting cheerful around drunks, dressing and living well to convey confidence, needing money for these expenses and for her demanding mother and brother, and knowing she's growing older. She's of an age when she must choose: to seek marriage (difficult given her tarnished occupation), to be a kept woman, or to borrow money to buy a bar of her own. Each route has dangers, including investors demanding a return on their loans. Keiko has a quiet dignity that attracts men, but are they what they seem? Does she actually have choices?

Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds more than a few surprises.

Two girls with the same name but very different personalities share an apartment in this sequel to Nana. The rising fame of Nana Osaki's band, the Black Stones, is beginning to take a toll on the best friends' relationship. Meanwhile, Nana Komatsu struggles to make sense of her love triangle with Black Stones' guitarist Nobu and rival group Trapnest's bassist Takumi.

Fatal desire tells the story of the first Internet-related murder in the United States. Sharee Miller is a 27-year-old fiancee, when interviewing with Jerry Cassaday in an Internet chat room. Soon they are in the real life begin a passionate affair. Cassaday plan to have a second chance to fall in love with Miller, and makes plans for their future together. During this time, Miller leads a double life full of lies. His talent for deception and manipulation reach their summit with the murder of the husband of Miller and the suicide of his lover.

A bestselling female novelist, suffering from writer's block, hires an innocent young woman to watch over her twin children. As the novelist dangerously indulges in her new best seller, the line between the life she's writing and the one she's living becomes blurred.

Suspense drama about a married salaryman whose affair with one of his co-workers is compromised when, returning from a clandestine meeting with his lover, he runs into a neighbor who is later accused of murder. Questioned by police about the neighbor, and blackmailed by his lover's neighbor, the salaryman's lies lead him on a path to destruction.

Cathryn is suffering from schizophrenia and is haunted by hallucinations of apparitions. Her husband has his mind on other things, while her mental state is deteriorating. She is unable to define whether the people around her, like visitors to their house, are real or imaginary.

A socially shunned columnist finds his romantic match online, but messaging under the wrong account causes his sleazy roommate’s picture to be forwarded, creating an identity mix-up.

A lonely shoe salesman and an eccentric performance artist struggle to connect in this unique take on contemporary life.

Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely devoted to her husband.

When an only child is struck by a car and dies, the child's mother seeks vengeance against the driver in this thrilling drama. The car was driven by the wife of a company president who is having an affair. The woman's husband manages to buy silence about the incident, but the victim's mother discovers the identity of the driver. After she secures a job in the home of the company president and his philandering spouse, the woman plans to murder the couple's son when he reaches the age of her late son.

After Nina Leeds finds out that insanity runs in her husband's family, she has a love child with a handsome doctor and lets her husband believes the child is his.

A poignant love story between a 29-year-old woman, who has once been a prostitute but is now the mistress of a wealthy jewelry merchant, and a 19-year-old college student.

Greg Sanderson is helping his wife, Jan, to recover from a nervous breakdown and revive their strained marriage. Their privacy is interrupted by the arrival of Greg's stunning and mysterious sister, Laura. Jan's paranoia deepens as she suspects that Greg's and her sister's relationship is too close. In her desperation, she confides her fears to the landlord but his weird reaction only creates more confusion.

On her bachelorette-party weekend with friends in New Orleans, Tara falls for the darkly-sexy bartender Patrick. Waking in his bed the next morning, Tara instantly regrets her unfaithfulness and flies back home to her fiancé. But her secret flame becomes a full-on fire when Patrick shows up at her house and begins stalking her every move. He spirals into madness and delusion, determined to have Tara no matter what the cost.

White-collar worker Yamashita finds out that his wife has a lover visiting her when he's away; so he suddenly returns home and kills her. After eight years in prison, he returns to live in a small village, opens a barber shop (he was trained as a barber in prison) and talks to almost no one except for the eel he "befriended" in prison. One day he finds the unconscious body of Keiko, who attempted suicide and reminds him of his wife. She starts to work at his shop, but he doesn't let her become close to him.

A group of four decides to commit suicide using gigantic fireworks. But every time the fireworks explode, they find themselves back in time before they carried out the plan. They suspect the cause to be the young age of one of the members and try to convince the high school girl to quit.

Over the course of a day in a California hospice, three terminally ill patients are observed with their families reflecting on life and death.

A wife nursing her terminally ill husband finds herself falling for his friend.

Yoshiko Sejima gets a call from a man claiming to be from her husband's company. He tells her that he will come to pick her up on behalf of her husband. It turns out that he's a kidnapper and takes Yoshiko to a hotel, and proceeds to rape her. This man Fuji Nakatogawa calls Yoshiko's husband but doesn't request a ransom. He's just bent on humiliating Yoshiko to submission to be his sex slave.

Faced with her parents' recent divorce, her mother working long hours and her high school boyfriend dumping her, 16-year-old Martha looks for solace in the world of Internet chat rooms. Innocent chatting turns deadly as Martha attracts the attention of a pedophile and cyber-kidnapping ring. Martha's mother Connie suspects foul play and begins a frantic search for her daughter, enlisting the help of the police, the FBI and an expert hacker.

A U.S. soccer star suffers a career-threatening injury in the run-up to the World Cup, and during his recovery, embarks on an epic romance with a Russian single mom.

A single mother from the country raising a 6th grade boy comes to Tokyo, leaves the boy to live with his uncle's family, runs a struggling grocery store, and works a local inn. The boy befriends a girl, the daughter of the innkeeper...

A mysterious love triangle leads to a tragic shooting. Months later, eight members of a MySpace-esque chat room are being gruesomely murdered in the privacy of their own homes.

Following both the death of her father-in-law and a divorce, Jesse, a New Yorker, returns to a small town to live with her now widowed mother-in-law. Jesse struggles to fit in with the local townsfolk who don’t welcome her with open arms to say the least. Jesse becomes acquainted with the local pastor, her widowed brother-in-law, falling in love with him, much to the dismay of the community. Things get even more complicated when her ex-husband comes calling, suspiciously trying to win her back. Between her love life and entangled in-laws, Jesse is tested as she seeks the answer to where she truly belongs.

Trying to put her life back together after the death of her husband, Libby and her children move to her estranged Aunt's goat farm in central Texas.

A man is involved in a fatal car accident, and though he is blameless, his company transfers him to a remote branch in a small town. Before he leaves, he gives the man's widow a large sum of money that she uses to move back to her hometown.

A woman and her daughter are in love with the same man, a chef at the restaurant that the mother manages. He is slightly crippled from frostbite in his years in Siberian labor camps and considers himself "already dead."

Koichi is a gigolo who is paid by a madame to seduce and have sex with various women while she and her clients secretly watch. He doesn't like what he's doing, but he needs the money to take care of his seriously ill mother. One day he's given the assignment to seduce a pretty waitress and they wind up falling in love. Koichi tells his madame that is going to quit, but she has other plans for him.

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughter living from hand to mouth in Twenties Tokyo. Based on the life and career of Fumiko Hayashi, the novelist whose work Naruse adapted to the screen several times, A Wanderer’s Notebook traces her bitter struggle for literary recognition in the first half of the twentieth century – her affairs with feckless men, the jobs she took to survive (peddler, waitress, bar maid), and her arduous, often humiliating attempts to get published in a male-dominated culture.

Mikio and his older brother Saneo, who is mentally handicapped, live together and have just buried their father. One day, Mikio hires a hooker named Marin for his brother. Marin is an underground singer who goes by the name Fala. A video producer who is filming Fala's documentary finds out about her double life, and proposes to film her and Saneo's sex life. Dreaming about leaving Tokyo with Saneo with a huge sum of money from the film, Mikio and Marin agree to the offer.

Naruse Uta is a "unique" 13 year old child. She possessed the talent to read sheet music even before she could speak, but has now come to the point where she hates playing the piano. Her father was also a piano virtuoso, but mysteriously disappeared from her life at a young age. Because of her father's disappearance Uta's mother had to move out of their posh home and into a far modest working class neighborhood. In this working class neighborhood there is a local grocer. The grocer's son Kikuna Oto happens to be a budding musician, but lacks the drive to truly succeed. That is until Uta Naruse comes into his life...

A father afflicted by photophobia searches for his daughter lost in the world of cybersex chat.

Working long hours in the emergency room, nurse Kana Aoshima befriends musician and frequent hospital patient Shogo Amami. Shogo's therapy visits for his muteness and blindness happen to frequently coincide with Kana's shift, which enables the nurse to get to know the handsome artist well enough to start falling in love with him. Fate intercedes, however, when Shogo is killed after being hit by a car - a development that utterly crushes Kana's will to live. Shogo's spirit is transported to heaven, where it is given the chance to return to Earth to assist Kana through her grieving and to renew her sense of faith in the world - with the only caveat being he cannot reveal his identity to Kana.

Japanese poet Akira living in Tokyo, loves American Ruth Vale, who was placed in the care of Akira's father when her missionary parents died. Ruth returns Akira's affections until she meets Edward, but the American proves an unfaithful husband. Three years later, Ruth is gravely ill while Edward amuses himself with his new lover, Adrienne Chester, but Akira comforts the dying woman with the promise that he will protect her little daughter Blossom.