A father and son prepare to die for their beliefs in this historical drama set in 18th century Japan. While Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune) has been loyal to Japan's feudal system all his life, his beliefs begin to change when the local rulers demand that his son Yogoro (Go Kato) give up his bride, who has bore a child that will come to power ...
Toshiro Mifune portrays a Samurai who finds himself in the middle of a feud-torn Japanese village. Neither side is particularly honorable, but Mifune is hungry and impoverished, so he agrees to work as bodyguard (or Yojimbo) for a silk merchant (Kamatari Fujiwara) against a sake merchant (Takashi Shimura). He then pretends to go to work for the ...
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 ...
Based on King's Ransom, an "87th Precinct" novel by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter), High and Low stars Toshiro Mifune as Gondo, a wealthy industrialist. Gondo is contacted by a gang of kidnappers, who inform him that they've kidnapped his son. The crooks demand a huge ransom for the boy's return -- an amount so huge that it will utterly bankrupt ...
In this epic Japanese samurai adventure, a bloodthirsty young fighter (Tatsuya Nakadai) kills a man in competition and is pursued by the slain warrior's brother. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Kwaidan is an impressively mounted anthology horror film based on four stories by Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born writer who began his career in the United States at the age of 19 and moved permanently to Japan in 1890 at the age of 40, where he eventually became a subject of the empire and took on the name Koizumi Yakuno. Hearn became a conduit of ...
In this samurai movie, an evil warrior violates his samurai codes of ethics by stealing some gold to pay an unfair government tax and then murdering the fishermen who witnessed the robbery. His actions are derided by his brother-in-law. In anger, the samurai casts his sister's husband out of the family. The outcast then joins a Shogunate to get ...
Misumi Kenji's Zatoichi: The Festival of Fire finds the famous blind swordsman becoming mixed up with a blind but powerful gangster. The town is a brutal place where women and children are regularly available to the highest bidder. Zatoichi takes a fancy to two local women, and this causes him to earn the ire of both two local men - one of them a ...
Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flattery of his treacherous sons (Akira Terao and ...
Samurai Assassin and Japan's Longest Day director Kihachi Okamoto offers a vivid dramatization of the bloodiest battle ever fought in the Pacific Theater with this combat film produced to portray the Japanese perspective on this landmark confrontation. The year is 1944, and when Allied forces descend on Okinawa the Japanese people become subject ...
Peter Mak Tai-kit spins this exuberant, visually dense adaptation from the popular similarly named Japanese anime. The film is set in a world where shape-shifting alien creatures known as Raptors have infiltrated human society. To deal with this problem, Hong Kong has fashioned a secret government task force aptly known as the Anti-Raptor Bureau, ...
Goyokin director Hideo Gosha makes his triumphant return to the samurai genre with this plot twisting, nerve shredding tale of an enigmatic bandit chieftain who resorts to elaborate trickery to finance a furious revenge plot. Tatsuya Nakadai is a desperate man. Robbery and con games are his specialty, and he'll swindle anyone who gets in his way ...
Several cinematic variations on Junichiro Tanizaki's novel about jealousy, voyeurism, and sexual arousal began with this award-winning drama by director Kon Ichikawa. Kenji Kenmochi (Ganjiro Nakamura) is the older and increasingly impotent husband of young Ikuko (Machiko Kyo). He is desperate to regain his virility and when injections fail to do ...
Originally titled Ningen No Joken, No Greater Love is the first of Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy. Drawing from his own experiences, Kobayashi weaves the tale of a Japanese pacifist, trying to get by as best he can during World War II. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the leading role of a mine supervisor, whose kindly ...
The second of Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy was titled The Road to Eternity (originally Zoku Ningen No Joken). Picking up where 1958's No Greater Love left off, this 1961 film finds the gentle, pacifistic Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) being sent to basic training camp in Manchuria in the waning days of World War II. Kaji ...
This docudrama by Kon Ichikawa is based on a real-life incident that took place in 1950. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (also the title of a novel on the subject by Yukio Mishima) rests in the northern hills of Kyoto. The original pavilion was a villa constructed by the Shogun Yoshimitsu (1358-1409) as a place for leisurely relaxation. After he ...
Just as many American studio-era directors found acclaim abroad that was denied them in their home country, by 1980 Akira Kurosawa's reputation outside Japan exceeded his esteem at home. As uncompromising as ever, he found considerable difficulty securing backing for his ambitious projects. Unsure he would be able to film it, the director, an ...
This well-regarded Japanese drama follows an aging samurai as he attempts to regain his family's honor. In 17th century Japan, a shift in the country's political structure has thrown the feudal Shogun system into disuse. Impoverished samurai wander the countryside, asking wealthy estate owners if they can commit hara-kiri, a grisly form of suicide ...
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