Filmed in 1954 as Gojira, this grandaddy of all Japanese giant-reptile epics was picked up for American distribution two years later, at which time several newly filmed inserts, featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin, were rabetted into the original footage. In both the Japanese and American versions of Godzilla, the story is basically ...
Set in the mid-19th century when the disintegration of a rigid social structure was turning the once wealthy into paupers, or vice-versa, this kinetic drama by acclaimed Akira Kurosawa features the hero Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), one of many samurai whose once traditional positions were fast disappearing. In this tale of false perceptions and truth ...
Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru details the existential struggle of one ordinary man in his desperate search for purpose. Upon learning he has terminal stomach cancer, a low-level government bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the year he has left to live. He is completely alone in the world -- his ...
Akira Kurosawa directs the black-and-white 1949 film noir Nora Inu (released in the U.S. in 1963 as Stray Dog). In his third film with Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune plays young police detective Murakami. One summer day on a crowded bus in Tokyo, his gun is stolen by a pickpocket. Rather than face the shame of reporting his gun missing, he chooses to go ...
This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial ...
Macbeth is reimagined as a samurai in feudal Japan in director Akira Kurosawa's classic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Familiar with Orson Welles's more faithful adaptation, Kurosawa chose to place a more personal stamp on his version by translating the events and characters to historical Japan. The equivalent of the tragic Scottish lord ...
Akira Kurosawa's epic tale concerns honor and duty during a time when the old traditional order is breaking down. The film opens with master samurai Kambei (Takashi Shimura) posing as a monk to save a kidnapped farmer's child. Impressed by his selflessness and bravery, a group of farmers begs him to defend their terrorized village from bandits. ...
Yasuzo Masumura's yakuza yarn begins with an assassination attempt on Takeo (played by novelist Yukio Mishima), a gangster about to be released from prison. The assassin kills the wrong guy, however, and Takeo is released. On the run from a rival gang boss (Eiji Funakoshi) whom he wounded before going to prison, and too cowardly to go after him ...
Released in Japan as Shubun, Scandal was the eleventh film directed by Akira Kurosawa (it was produced just prior to his more famous Rashomon). The director described it as a "protest" film about press journalism. The film sets forth the theory that the postwar Japanese press was too free in its insinuations, and that personal privacy had been ...
A dedicated army surgeon finds his once-bright future suddenly obscured when he contracts syphilis while performing a life-saving operation in this early collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune. Contaminated with a disease that was virtually incurable in 1940s Japan, Fujisaki returns home from the war to work presided over ...
Japanese sci-fi director Inoshiro Honda and special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya teamed up again (Rodan, Godzilla, Mothra) for this thriller/adventure. Set in the futuristic 1980, a group of Tokyo scientists discover that Earth is in the direct path of a star with a gravitational pull 6,000 times than that of Earth's. As a space ship finds itself ...
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