The official website for Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai has been updated with a teaser trailer.

This is a 3D remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 film Harakiri (Seppuku) and will be competing for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in a few weeks.

Taking over for Tatsuya Nakadai, who starred in the original version, Kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa plays a poverty-stricken samurai named Hanshiro Tsugumo who arrives at the manor of a feudal lord under the pretense of wanting to find a suitable place to commit seppuku. The lord sees this as a bluff, as many hard up samurai had made the same request in hopes of getting a hand-out. However, Tsugumo’s true motive is to complete the last part of his vengeance. Eita, Koji Yakusho, and Hikari Mitsushima also star.

Shochiku will be releasing “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai” in Japan sometime in October 2011.

The official website for Katsuhito Ishii’s Smuggler has been updated with a 30-second teaser.

The film stars Satoshi Tsumabuki as a failed actor named Ryosuke who takes a part-time job at a pachinko parlor. After racking up a huge debt, he’s forced to take a smuggling job from a yakuza company chief (Yasuko Matsuyuki) who offers him 50,000 yen per successful delivery.

Unfortunately for Ryosuke, the reason for this big payout is that his new job actually entails disposing of corpses in the middle an escalating gang war, and making even the slightest mistake could prove deadly.

Warner Bros. will be releasing “Smuggler” in Japan on October 22, 2011.

Thanks to logboy for the heads up.

Nagoya TV Next has uploaded a trailer for Daisuke Tengan’s Dendera to their channel on YouTube.

Tengan is the eldest son of director Shohei Imamura, whose film The Ballad of Narayama won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. It told the story of a remote village which avoided the potential burden of caring for the elderly by banishing them to the top of a nearby mountain to die when they reached the age of 70.

Based on a 2009 novel by Yuya Sato, Dendera covers the same topic from a completely different angle. In the film, 50 elderly women who were abandoned and left to die on “Old Lady Mountain” manage to survive the harsh conditions by banding together and forming a village called “Dendera”. Some of them simply want to live out their final days in peace, while others want revenge against the villagers and family members that abandoned them.

Toei will be releasing “Dendera” in Japan on June 25, 2011.

A trailer for Shinji Aoyama’s Tokyo Koen (Tokyo Park) has been uploaded to the Showgate channel on Yahoo! Japan.

Based on a novel by Yukiya Shoji, the film stars Haruma Miura as a college student and aspiring photographer named Koji. One day, while Koji is taking pictures of families in a Tokyo park, a man (Hiroshi Takahashi) suddenly appears within his camera’s view and interrupts his shot. However, he’s later contacted by the man with an odd request. Without revealing the purpose of the job, he asks Koji to take photographs of a woman (Haruka Igawa) who walks through the park with her young daughter. Koji agrees, but the strange task leads to changes in the relationships he has with the women in his life.

Those women include a longtime friend that Koji can talk to about anything (Nana Eikura) and his step-sister (Manami Konishi), who offers both kindness and firm encouragement when he needs it. As Koji photographs the new third woman in his life, he feels as if she reminds him of someone from a distant memory.

Showgate will be releasing “Tokyo Koen” in Japan on June 18, 2011.