Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1952 • Japan
Starring Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, IKIRU shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death. Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived twopart structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, IKIRU is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.
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Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko TsushimaOne of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...
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I Live in Fear
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1955 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Minoru ChiakiBoth the final film of this period in which Akira Kurosawa would directly wrestle with the demons of the Second World War and his most literal representation of living in an atomic age, the galvanizing I LIVE IN FEA...
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Throne of Blood
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1957 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru ChiakiA vivid, visceral “Macbeth” adaptation, THRONE OF BLOOD, directed by Akira Kurosawa, sets Shakespeare’s definitive tale of ambition and duplicity in a ghostly, fog-enshrouded landscape in feudal Japan....
