Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1985 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu

With RAN, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare’s “King Lear” as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa’s late-life mas...

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1962 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentaro Mikuni, Akira Ishihama

Following the collapse of his clan, an unemployed samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to be allowed to commit ritual suicide on the property. Iyi’s clansmen, belie...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1961 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoko Tsukasa

The incomparable Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa’s visually stunning and darkly comic YOJIMBO. To rid a terror-stricken village of corruption, wily masterless samurai Sanjuro turns a range war...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1963 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU), the highly influential domesti...

Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1960 • Japan
Starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan

WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse’s finest hour, a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hoste...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1962 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiju Kobayashi

Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Akira Kurosawa’s tightly paced, beautifully composed SANJURO. In this sly companion piece to YOJIMBO, jaded samurai SANJURO helps an...

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1965 • Japan
Starring Rentaro Mikuni, Keiko Kishi, Katsuo Nakamura

After more than a decade of sober political dramas and socially minded period pieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of...

Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka • 1962 • Japan
Starring Ineko Arima, Tatsuya Nakadai, Mieko Takamine

Kinuyo Tanaka’s final work as a director evokes the golden age of Japanese cinema with a large-scale, sixteenth-century-set costume drama. Produced by the independent studio Ninjin Kurabu, LOVE UNDER T...

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1967 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Yoko Tsukasa, Go Kato

Toshiro Mifune stars as Isaburo Sasahara, an aging swordsman living a quiet life until his clan lord orders that his son marry the lord’s mistress, who has recently displeased the ruler. Reluctantly, fathe...

Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita • 1961 • Japan

A woman is pushed to marry a rich but impaired man against her will, but soon her estranged lover reappears... Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita.

Directed by Hideo Gosha • 1978 • Japan

Tatsuya Nakadai stars as a vengeful ex-samurai commanding a gang of outlaws in an attack on the castle of his former master.

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1956 • Japan

Perhaps Masaki Kobayashi's most sordid film, BLACK RIVER examines the rampant corruption on and around U.S. military bases in Japan following World War II. Kobayashi spirals out from the story of a love triangle that develops between a good-natured stu...

Directed by Hideo Gosha • 1979 • Japan

In Hideo Gosha's film, loyalty and ambition lead to tragic consequences for a yakuza boss (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his bodyguard.

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara • 1966 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Machiko Kyo, Mikijiro Hira

A staggering work of existential science fiction, THE FACE OF ANOTHER dissects identity with the sure hand of a surgeon. Okuyama (YOJIMBO’s Tatsuya Nakadai), after being burned and disfigured in a...

“No Greater Love”
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1959 • Japan

Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour THE HUMAN CONDITION (NINGEN NO JOKEN), adapted from Junpe...

“Road to Eternity”
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1959 • Japan

Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour THE HUMAN CONDITION (NINGEN NO JOKEN), adapted from Junp...

“A Soldier’s Prayer”
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1961 • Japan

Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour THE HUMAN CONDITION (NINGEN NO JOKEN), adapted from Ju...

Directed by Kihachi Okamoto • 1966 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Toshiro Mifune

Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune star in the story of a wandering samurai who exists in a maelstrom of violence. A gifted swordsman plying his craft during the turbulent final days of shogunate rule in Japan, R...

ZATOICHI #21
Directed by Kenji Misumi • 1970 • Japan

Cowritten by star Shintaro Katsu, this adventure pits Zatoichi against one of his most diabolical foes: a blind yakuza boss whose reign of terror and exploitation has made him nearly mythic. Guest starring the legendary Tatsuya Nakadai as a ro...

Directed by Kon Ichikawa • 1958 • Japan
Starring Raizo Ichikawa, Tatsuya Nakadai

Adapted from a novel by Yukio Mishima and told in an intricate flashback structure, CONFLAGRATION dramatizes the psychological collapse of Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), a young Buddhist acolyte from a dysfunctional f...

Directed by Kon Ichikawa • 1959 • Japan
Starring Ganjiro Nakamura, Machiko Kyo

Kon Ichikawa’s ODD OBSESSION is a strange dark comedy on a then-forbidden subject—impotence, and jealousy as a cure for it. The movie explores the links between love, jealousy, and rage, all from the standpoint of...

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi • 1962 • Japan

On his deathbed, a wealthy businessman announces that his fortune is to be split equally among his three illegitimate children, whose whereabouts are unknown. A bevy of lawyers and associates begin machinations to procure the money for themselves, reso...

Directed by Kihachi Okamoto • 1968 • Japan
Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Etsushi Takahashi, Yuriko Hoshi

In this pitch-black action comedy by Kihachi Okamoto, a pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, previously...