A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing _The Bad Sleep Well._ Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of _Hamlet_ and American film noir to chilling effect.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1960
35 mm, DVD
By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s _Dodes’ka-den_ follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Kurosawa’s gloriously shot first color film displays all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1970
35 mm, DVD
In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1948
35 mm, 16 mm
The Hidden Fortress delivers Kurosawa’s trademark deft blend of wry humor, breathtaking action, and compassionate humanity.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1958
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Adapting Ed McBain's detective novel _King's Ransom,_ Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1963
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
_I Live in Fear_ presents Toshiro Mifune as an elderly, stubborn businessman so fearful of a nuclear attack that he resolves to move his reluctant family to South America. Kurosawa depicts a society emerging from the shadows but still terrorized by memories of the past and anxieties for the future.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1955
35 mm, DVD
The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul's reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this "folly" looks ever more fascinating.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1951
DVD
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1952
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Working with his most celebrated actor, Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa faithfully adapts Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play, keeping the original’s focus on the conflict between illusion and reality.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, DVD
The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1945
DVD
This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet it anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1944
DVD
In Akira Kurosawa's first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, who transforms herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist during a tumultuous decade in Japanese history.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1946
DVD
This affectionate paean to young love is also a frank examination by Akira Kurosawa of the harsh realities of postwar Japan. During a Sunday trip into war-ravaged Tokyo, Yuzo and Masako look for work and lodging, as well as affordable entertainments to pass the time.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1947
DVD
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa's _Red Beard_ chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director (Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa).
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1965
35 mm, DVD
In Kurosawa's sly companion piece to _Yojimbo,_ jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a "proper" samurai on its ear.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1962
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
Kurosawa’s effortless debut is a thrilling martial arts action tale, but it’s also a moving story of moral education that’s quintessential Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1943
DVD
Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1945
DVD
A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1950
DVD
One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1954
DCP, 35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
When a pickpocket steals a rookie detective’s gun on a hot, crowded bus, the cop goes undercover in a desperate attempt to right the wrong. Kurosawa’s thrilling noir probes the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1949
35 mm, DVD
A vivid, visceral Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan.
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1957
35 mm, 16 mm, Blu-ray, DVD
To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) turns a range war between two evil clans to his own advantage in Akira Kurosawa's visually stunning and darkly comic _Yojimbo._
Akira Kurosawa
Japan,
1961
35 mm, Blu-ray, DVD