Godzilla Minus One

Set in the immediate aftermath of Japan's defeat, it follows a failed kamikaze pilot carrying his survival as shame, in a Tokyo already flattened, when a creature enlarged by atomic testing arrives to finish what the war started.

Takashi Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the effects, and made the film for a fraction of a Hollywood blockbuster's budget while winning the Academy Award for Visual Effects, the first Japanese film to do so.

The point is that it returns Godzilla to the original's meaning: the monster is the war, the trauma is the subject, and the human story of men told they were expendable is the actual film.

The train sequence and the first Ginza attack are staged with real weight and real terror.

It was an enormous global hit and reminded everybody what the character was invented to be.