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Rashomon
:Description:A cinema classic, Rashomon introduced the Western world to the greatness of Akira Kurosawa and paved the way for fellow masters of the Japanese film industry. Using an innovative narrative style, this eloquent director reveals how the truth in any situation depends on your point of view. Four different narrators describe the same brutal act--a woman's rape and her husband's consequent death--yet the facts elude us because each interprets the story to make himself appear in the best light. Machiko Kyo and Toshiro Mifune turn in magnificent performances as the lady ...
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Sanshiro Sugata (AKA Judo Saga)
:Description:Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Ikiru), perhaps the best known of all Japanese directors, made his extraordinary debut with this thrilling martial arts film. Though filming during World War II, Kurosawa avoided patriotic and propagandistic elements to create a judo saga as visually stunning as it is exciting. The story of Sanshiro Sugata, a talented yet headstrong judo student, chronicles the struggle to establish judo, rather than jujitsu, as Japan's premiere martial art. Wartime censors ordered many cuts, but could not destroy the power of Kurosawa's vision. With its strong emphasis on ...
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Yojimbo
:Description:Kurosawa's blackly humorous film, executed in the style of the American Western, is a sophisticated satire on greed, violence, paranoia, and human weakness. In a nonchalant manner reminiscent of a Bogart hero, a wandering samurai-for-hire (Mifune) turns the war between two clans fighting for control of a small town to his own advantage. One of the most popular Japanese films ever released in the U.S., Yojimbo inspired the Clint Eastwood film A Fistful of Dollars. essential video:This semi-comic 1961 film by legendary director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Ran) was inspired by ...
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Dersu Uzala
: essential video:During an unusual chapter in the career of director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon), the filmmaker went to Russia because he found working in his native Japan to be too difficult. The result was this striking 1975 near-epic based on the turn-of-the-century autobiographical novels of a military explorer (Yuri Solomin) who met and befriended a Goldi man in Russia's unmapped forests. Kurosawa traces the evolution of a deep and abiding bond between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the sub-zero Siberian woods. There's ...
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Seven Samurai
:Description:This extraordinary tale of adventure, romance, humor, and suspense has been hailed by critics worldwide as one of the best films of all time. A peasant village hires seven medieval mercenaries to defend it from marauding bandits. When the samurais arrive, a spectacular series of battles begin in which a splendidly mobile camera seems to be everywhere: shooting through foliage, rainstorms, dust, and wind. Toshiro Mifune's performance is ferocious as an overzealous and loudmouthed would-be samurai. He is complemented by the wise, veteran warrior played masterfully by Takashi Shimura. The inspiration ...
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Throne of Blood
:Description:Akira Kurosawa's savage, free-flowing adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth plunges viewers into an eerie, fog-shrouded world of madness and obsession. International star Toshiro Mifune gives one of his finest performances as the proud warrior who is destroyed by his wife's murderous greed and his self-consuming ambition. Set in medieval Japan during a period of feudal conflict, Kurosawa's brilliantly staged classic bristles with energy from its first frenzied battle to its brutal climax. essential video:A champion of illumination and experimental shading, Kurosawa brings his unerring eye for indelible images to Shakespeare in ...
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Red Beard
:Description:Kurosawa's 'monument to the goodness of man' depicts the touching and tumultuous relationship between a vain young doctor and a compassionate clinic director. The ambitious intern is initially angered to be assigned to an impoverished clinic but, under Red Beard's careful tutelage, comes to cherish the lives of each of his destitute patients. The elder doctor, played magnificently by Mifune, is a fascinating blend of quiet dignity and raw anger that creates film moments of great pathos, action, and humor. :Featuring the final collaboration between esteemed director Akira Kurosawa (Kagemusha, The ...
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Kagemusha
: essential video:The 1970s were difficult years for the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Following the box-office failure of his 1970 film Dodes'ka-den and an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Kurosawa was unable to find financial backing in Japan, and he made his acclaimed 1975 film Dersu Uzala in Siberia with Russian financing. With only partial Japanese backing for his epic project Kagemusha, the 70-year-old master then found American support from George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, who served as coexecutive producers (through 20th Century Fox) for this magnificent 1980 production--to that date ...
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Rashomon ~ The International Collection (1986)
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Sanjuro
:Description:The gruff and arrogant hero of Yojimbo returns to the screen in another offbeat action film from Akira Kurosawa, the playful master of the samurai genre. This time, the slovenly but highly skilled warrior (played by the wonderfully deadpan Toshiro Mifune) helps a group of earnest, young samurai rid their clan of corruption. Amid the comic-book style combat, Sanjuro displays a delightfully cynical disregard for notions of good and evil and a mischievous sense of humor. :Akira Kurosawa's sequel to Yojimbo is more lighthearted and less cynical, a rousing adventure with ...
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