Floating Weeds is a 1959 film by Yasujiro Ozu and shot in colour by Kazuo Miyagawa, one of Japan’s most highly regarded cinematographers. It is a remake of Ozu’s own 1934 black-and-white silent film A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). The film takes place during a hot summer in 1958 at a seaside town in the Inland Sea. Read more…
Early Summer is a 1951 drama directed by Yasujiro Ozu and starring Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. Like most Ozu films, Early Summer deals with many issues ranging from communication problems between generations and the rising role of women in post-war Japan. Noriko lives contentedly in an extended family household that includes her parents and her brother’s family, but an uncle’s visit prompts the family to find her a husband. Read more…
Late Spring is a 1949 black and white film drama directed by YasujirÅ Ozu and starring Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara. Many consider this extremely chaste film between a father and his marriageable daughter his finest achievement. The story concerns Noriko, who lives happily with her widowed father and seems in no hurry to get married. Her father, a professor, however, wants to see her settled and conspires with his sister to trick Noriko into pursuing an arranged marriage. Read more…
Drunken Angel is a 1948 Kurosawa movie starring Takashi Shimura as an alcoholic doctor in postwar Japan who treats a young, small-time hood named Matsunaga (ToshirÅ Mifune), after a gunfight with a rival syndicate. The doctor diagnoses the young gangster with tuberculosis, and convinces him to begin treatment for it. The two enjoy an uneasy friendship until the gangster’s former boss is released from prison and seeks to take his gang over once again. The sick young man then stops following the doctor’s advice, slips back into old habits and threatens to kill him, while his life is further endangered by his gangster lifestyle. Read more…
Onibaba is a 1964 horror movie based on a Buddhist parable. Directed by Kaneto ShindÅ, the film is set in rural Japan in the fourteenth century Nanboku-chÅ period and features Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as a woman and her daughter-in-law who attack and kill passing samurai, strip them of their valuable armor and possessions, and dispose of the bodies in a deep pit. Read more…
Jigoku (Japanese for Hell) is a 1960 horror movie directed by Nobuo Nakagawa and starring Utako Mitsuya and Shigeru Amachi. Jigoku is notable for separating itself from other Japanese horror films of the era such as Kwaidan or Onibaba due to its graphic imagery of torment in Hell. Read more…
Samurai Rebellion is a 1967 jidaigeki (period drama) directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Its original Japanese title is JÅi-uchi: HairyÅ tsuma shimatsu, which translates as Rebellion: Receive the Wife. The movie is set in the Edo period of Japan. Toshiro Mifune plays Isaburo Sasahara, a vassal of the daimyo of the Aisu clan. Read more…
The Samurai Trilogy is a film trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring ToshirÅ Mifune as Musashi Miyamoto and Koji Tsuruta as KojirÅ Sasaki. The films are based on the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa, about the famous duellist and author of The Book of Five Rings.
Together, they are a trilogy of epic proportions following the character growth of Musashi from brash—yet strong—young soldier to thoughtful and introspective samurai, culminating in Musashi’s duel with the greatest opponent he would ever face. Read more…
Koheita (Koji Yakusho) is a samurai with such a reputation for debauchery that his nickname is “Dora-Heita” (Alley Cat), so his appointment as magistrate of the most corrupt township in all of Japan raises a few eyebrows on both sides of the law… But little does everyone know that it’s all a carefully constructed front to outwit the criminals and outfight the righteous samurai who think he’s too disgraceful to live!
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The Hidden Fortress is a 1958 movie directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring ToshirÅ Mifune as General Rokurota Makabe and Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki. A literal translation of the Japanese title is The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress. Read more…