Postwar Japanese cinema is as powerful and influential as any in the world, yet its standing in this country remains tenuous. Except Akira Kurosawa, whose films enjoy a singular international pipeline, the most celebrated Japanese filmmakers are known here for isolated breakthroughs, which apparently never justify a comprehensive importation. New DVD releases are beginning to address this drought, but not always as one might expect.

The Criterion Collection currently offers five matchless films by Yasujiro Ozu, Japan’s poet of domestic entropy – the recently issued “Early Summer”

(1951) is an ideal starting point. But try to find anything by Kenji Mizoguchi, whose ghostly epics have disappeared after appearing on a flurry of laser discs in the 1990s. Despite a longstanding cult following, “Onibaba” is the only available film by Kaneto Shindo; the unrepresentative “Tokyo Olympiad” persists as the sole representation of Kon Ichikawa; and though the recent successes of Shohei Imamura’s sexual riddles, “The Eel” and “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge,” have raised his profile, his early works, including the masterpiece “Insect Woman,” languish in out-of-print or never-crossed-the ocean purgatory. How many others are completely unknown to us?

One kind of Japanese film now thrives in Tarantino-land: Yakuza bloodlettings and other crime pictures, ranging from the low-rent series about Zatoichi, the blind samurai masseur who can fillet an entire gang in seconds, to the stylishly dark and witty underworld expeditions of Seijun Suzuki, to the more fashionably brutal nihilism of Kinji Fukasaku, whose five-volume “Yakuza Papers” is scheduled for release on DVD this fall by a company that has taken the lead in Asian pulp fiction, HVE. Meantime, two remarkable lower-profile crime dramas floated quietly to shore last week. Grab them while you can.

“Zero Focus” (1961) and “The Demon” (1978) should stimulate interest in director Yoshitaro Nomura and novelist Seicho Matsumoto, whose work he faithfully adapted. Both were hugely popular in Japan between the 1950s and the 1980s, without achieving traction in other time zones. Few of Matsumoto’s best-selling police procedurals, which are admired in Japan for their social scrutiny, have made it into English; the one that has achieved some success here, “Inspector Imanishi Investigates,” was filmed by Mr. Nomura as “The Castle of Sand” (1974). (This film is touted on the packaging of the current DVDs, despite not being available here.) The evidence of these two films, however, is enough to make me want to see much more of Mr. Nomura, who isn’t listed in standard reference works about international directors.

The cover of “Zero Focus” classifies the film as Hitchcockian – standard shorthand to promote every kind of suspense thriller. In this instance, the comparison cheats no one but is superficial all the same. Hitchcock rarely made mysteries, and the stylistic connections are too general to mean much: the thrashing waters against a rocky cliff, as in “Suspicion”; the deadly fall, as in “Vertigo”; a mini-“North by Northwest” trek from Tokyo to the Noto Peninsula; plus such Hitchcock constants as the brilliantly descriptive musical score (by Yasushi Akutagawa), lots of train scenes, sexual shame, buried secrets, strange pointof-view shots, and much suspense. There’s even a deceptive flashback, as in “Stage Fright,” but whereas Hitchcock’s was a deliberate lie, Mr. Nomura’s is a misguided speculation – leading to a bravura flashback within a flashback that, being truthful, is far crueler.

Mr. Nomura’s genre borrowings greatly exceed Hitchcock (some of whose best and most overlooked work is now available in an excellent nine-volume compilation from Warner Home Video, “Alfred Hitchcock: The Signature Collection”). Among them: Raymond Chandler’s whore who marries money and kills to keep her secret, Cornell Woolrich’s isolated woman forced to investigate a crime the police have bungled; and Daphne du Maurier’s mousy young wife and assorted doppelgangers. In the specifics, however, the film is purely Japanese, from Takashi Kawabata’s superb black-and-white location photography to such details as absurdly oversized telephones. More significant are the two endemic societal issues that animate the story: women who turned to streetwalking during the American occupation and men who resorted to bigamy in the years that followed.

No less Japanese is the acting. Nearly every character is obliged to pretend to be something other than what he or she is, so that a peculiar stiffness pervades the first half. When the masks finally fall away, the performances turn volatile. On a second viewing, nothing is more impressive than the actors’ control, which parallels the director’s infallible tempo in unraveling the narrative. The main performers are women, and though the stars Yoshiko Kuga and Hizuru Takachino are compelling as the wife and her nemesis, the exquisite Ineko Arima as the “other woman” steals the picture from under their noses.

“The Demon” similarly cuts through the veneer of the communal fabric and is a more impressive and original film, but not one as easily recommended. It isn’t a horror film in any conventional sense – no monster, nothing supernatural, not much violence – yet its subject is so horrific that some people (say, parents) will quail at the thought of it. Once again, the story involves the dangerous cliffs of western Japan, bigamous men, and murder (cyanide figures in both pictures); this time the intended victims are small, trusting children and the demon is their loving father. Needless to say, “The Demon” could never have been made in the United States. Yet Matsumoto’s novel was based on an actual incident in a time of widespread child abandonment.

No less grueling than the material is Mr. Nomura’s radical shift in tone. An abandoned mistress tracks down the married father of her three children, dumps them on him and his furious wife, and disappears. For the next half-hour, you think you’re watching situation comedy in which a likable, clueless father learns to take responsibility. Weaned on Hollywood, we expect his irate wife to eventually cool down and show her maternal instincts. Instead, she grows increasingly malevolent and, after a heated bout of lovemaking, convinces her husband that the offspring must go. What follows is gripping, right through to a conclusion that is as oddly satisfying as it is utterly unexpected.

Nomura’s deliberate pacing, the exceptional performances of his cast, the saturated color photography of Kawabata, and the lush music of Akutagawa all conspire to disarm you, until the veil falls away. Paradoxically, the most awful moment is an elegant long shot in profile of the cliff’s edge, also used in “Zero Focus” but to different effect – an aesthetic breather at a moment when you need one.

“The Demon” bears comparison to Shohei Imamura’s true-crime study, “Vengeance is Mine,” made a few months earlier. Both films dispassionately observe unspeakable evil and feature the great Ken Ogata as a sociopath who destroys, with shockingly impulsive malevolence, those he professes to love – and wins sympathy in spite of himself. The roles are radically different (in the first, a slick con-man and serial killer; in the second, a desperately poor printer enslaved to some kind of insane logic), and Ogata so thoroughly disappears into each that you can scarcely believe it’s the same actor. Mayumi Ogawa is also in both films, a desperate mistress twice over, but the actor who most impressively withstands Ogata’s demonic power is 6-year-old Hiroki Iwase. You won’t soon forget him or either of these films.