With 30 titles to his name as a director since his 1943 debut Sanshiro Sugata (and many more as a screenwriter), distilling Kurosawa’s must-see titles into a tidy top 10 list is something of a fools errand. The film was widely acclaimed domestically, winning the Blue Ribbon Award, Kinema Junpo Award, and Mainichi Film Award for best film. The most expensive Japanese production of its day, it introduced all the hallmarks associated with Kurosawa’s name: an epic runtime detailing the recruitment of the mercenary force, the training of the farmers, and the fortification of the village in anticipation of the climactic attack (the original western release was trimmed down from the original 207 minutes); on-location shooting with a strong focus on landscapes and environmental conditions to reflect the inner psychologies of the human elements within them; a fastidious recreation of sets, costumes and weaponry of the era; and lots and lots of stunning horse-bound battle sequences shot using multiple camera setups. Akira Kurosawa redefined the action film with his samurai epics set in Japan’s medieval past. The film also lent its name to the Rashomon Effect, which refers to contradictory descriptions of the same events given by different people. The film is best remembered for the striking scene in which Mifune’s character, Macbeth’s equivalent, meets his death in a hail of arrows. While the relentless verbal punning in the dialogue is occasionally lost in translation (the title, meaning ‘Not Yet’, alludes to a legend about an old man who refuses to relinquish his hold on life), the discernible self-reflective aspect to this celebration of a life well-lived nevertheless has an undeniable poignancy. Yojimbo (1961) Although the majority of Kurosawa’s films were contemporary dramas, he tends to be best known for his samurai works. Yojimbo may well be Kurosawa’s most influential work, and it certainly is among his best. ©2021 British Film Institute. There is nothing subpar within this large and varied body of work, and I’ve omitted many a worthy title in the aim of giving a fuller picture of the fruits of an incredible six-decade filmmaking career. This in itself is reflected in the ease by which they’ve in turn established an action template so readily adapted by filmmakers from all over the world. Over a career of about sixty years, Kurosawa made critically acclaimed masterpieces like Seven Samurai and Rashomon. Although the script uses not a single line from its source, Kurosawa’s celebrated transplantation of Macbeth to the lawless realm of 16th-century Japan counts among the finest screen adaptations of Shakespeare ever realised, a faithful rendition of the story that works perfectly within its own historical context. Rashomon is the film that marked the beginning of Kurosawa’s international fame, as well as serving as an introduction to Japanese film for a foreign audience after it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an honorary Oscar in 1951 and 1952 respectively. How many have you seen? Dersu Uzala is truly one of a kind. Hugely influenced by the Hollywood films of John Ford, as well as by Shakespeare, he made films about characters and situations that audiences in the West easily recognized. Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura is wonderful as the man who only finds meaning in his life as death rears its ugly head, while his in-laws wrangle over his pension pot. Kane and Vertigo don’t top the chart by divine right. Japanese horror movies got a big leg-up in the 1950s and 1960s with Ugetsu and Kwaidan , before spinning heads over time with transgressive cult works ( Tetsuo: The Ironman ), comedic takes ( Hausu , One Cut of the Dead ), and crossover hits ( … The austere staging and performances, drawing upon traditional Noh theatre, lend an appropriate note of theatricality to proceedings, blurring the gap between the real and the supernatural, while Kurosawa surpasses even himself with the quite jaw-dropping climax as Washizu’s violent misdeeds catch up with him. Kurosawa limited himself to one title per director, giving a unique perspective on the best world directors and his personal favorites. With Japan’s studio system increasingly incapable of accommodating the costs of the long shooting periods and large-scale sets and action sequences required for his productions, Kurosawa left his studio Toho after Red Beard (1965). Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO for his debut film, boy wonder Welles created a modernist masterpiece that is regularly voted the best film ever made. The relatively modest 110-minute runtime makes this (and its shorter 1962 follow-up Sanjuro) a more accessible entry point into Kurosawa’s oeuvre than his more grandiose swords-and-samurai sagas. Menu. As Mifune’s enigmatic masterless samurai roams into a desolate town overrun by grotesque rival criminal gangs, the whistling wind whisks leaves down deserted streets through which a dog runs with a severed human hand clamped in its mouth and the grimy residents, cowering behind shutters, fear to tread. Its title translates literally as ‘Spider’s Web Castle’, and the gothic setting of a deserted castle filled with dark shadows and swathed in fog forms the perfect frame for Mifune’s tortured turn as Washizu, the samurai usurper haunted by past crimes. With the financial and critical failure of Dodes’ka-den, a portrait of the grimy denizens of a shantytown on the outskirts of Tokyo, an attempted suicide threatened to put an end to Kurosawa’s career. The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Akira Kurosawa (23 March 1910 — 6 September 1998) is one of Japanese cinema’s few household names in the west, due to such groundbreaking jidaigeki period action films as Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Kagemusha (1980). It incorporates numerous elements of Japanese Noh Theatre, which dates back to the 14th century. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is often regarded as one of the best and most influential directors in the history of cinema. Needless to say, the outraged artist refuses to take things lying down and vows to take the magazine’s editor to court. Winner of the best director award at the Venice Film Festival 2020 for his period espionage drama Wife of a Spy, Kurosawa was known initially as a proponent of the horror genre, his first films coinciding with the turn of the millennium wave of J-horror. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are just as searing. With a running time of over 200 minutes, Kurosawa’s first samurai film is a quintessential action film, and it exerted enormous influence on both Japanese cinema and Hollywood, most notably in the 1960 Western remake The Magnificent Seven. Ironically, that foreign language was Russian, and the country Kurosawa was representing was the Soviet Union. Partly inspired by George Stevens’s Shane (1952), Kurosawa’s quintessential ‘samurai/western’ Yojimbo (‘The Bodyguard’) thrives on this cross-cultural synergy, right down to the soundtrack. Kurosawa was the first Japanese filmmaker whose work I decided to thoroughly explore and because of him I ended up going on a Samurai Cinema quest, which lasted for over 100 films, and that in-turn lead to a Japanese Cinema quest, which led to over 450 films seen and explorations of 40+ other Japanese filmmakers. Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese director, was born 100 years ago today. Akira Kurosawa is unquestionably the best known Japanese filmmaker in the West. 28. The story stars two humorous bumbling peasants who find themselves caught up in a major conflict involving a princess and rival warring factions, which makes you think of how R2-D2 and C-3PO got unwittingly mixed up in an epic battle between good and evil. BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 Years of Japanese Cinema is a major celebration of Japanese cinema beginning on BFI Player. The film that launched Kurosawa’s name outside his homeland (and those of its stars Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo), Rashomon’s Golden Lion Award at Venice in 1951 awakened a postwar generation of international festival and arthouse audiences to the manifold pleasures of Japanese cinema. Kurosawa transports Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan in this masterly movie, which features a mesmerising performance by Toshiro Mifune. He is still considered to be one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers in history and he is beloved worldwide. Refine See titles to watch instantly, titles you haven't rated, etc Instant Watch Options This includes a complete list of films with which he was involved (including the films on which he worked as assistant director before becoming a full director), as well as his little-known contributions to theater, television and literature. … The Top 20 Movies Directed by Akira Kurosawa; The Best Horror Movies Of the 1980s; The Best Science Fiction Movies of 1977; The Best Comedy Movies Of the 2000s; The Most Recently Released Movies; The Most Recently Added Movies; Movies by Decade from this Chart. Combining two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, its script also broke the mould of conventional cinema plotting, introducing the concept of the unreliable narrator in its contradictory accounts of the rape of a samurai’s wife as relayed by the key suspects and witnesses to the crime, including one testimony delivered from the murdered samurai himself by a medium. The first of two films Kurosawa made for the Shochiku studio (alongside the Dostoevsky adaptation The Idiot in 1951), this punchy social drama takes a righteous swipe at the gutter press, as Toshiro Mifune’s up-and-coming painter is snapped by the paparazzi while sitting on a hotel balcony with a famous singer (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi), the photo inspiring a fabricated story in a popular gossip magazine. Here Mifune plays a gangster who contracts tuberculosis and develops a bond with the hard-drinking doctor who diagnosed him. Along with Tarkovsky, I consider Kurosawa the greatest of all filmmakers. Hand-picked. Akira Kurosawa (1910-98) was the director who first brought international attention to Japanese cinema. Set in the 19th century, the story concerns a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama, later a popular musician) who is being trained by an older physician (Mifune), and their various interactions with patients and each other. 248. During the final days of World War II, production funds for Japanese films were at a bare minimum. Based on Arsenyev’s encounters in 1902 with the elderly, gnomic, nature-loving scout from the nomadic Nanai tribe who lends his name to the film (and served as a model for George Lucas’s creation, Yoda), it sees Kurosawa back in epic form as the two wrestle against the ice and snow of the steppes. All rights reserved. Without further ado, here are Akira Kurosawa's 5 Best Films (& 5 Worst). 0. The masterful atmospheric cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa, and the late-10th-century Heian period setting adds to the haunting, purgatorial ambience. The Top 20 Movies Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa; The Best Horror Movies Of the 1980s; The Best Science Fiction Movies of 1977; The Best Comedy Movies Of the 2000s; The Most Recently Released Movies; The Most Recently Added Movies; Movies by Decade … News, features and opinion on the world of film. It worked out. It received the year’s Academy Award for best foreign language film. The film was released in Japan in 1951, but in the United States only in 1963. Top 10 Akira Kurosawa Films. While certainly not the first samurai story committed to film, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai nonetheless set a standard, pretty much from the moment it was released. Kurosawa had famously extended production costs, along with the timeline Toho Studios had wanted him to adhere to. Inspired by several real-life incidents, No Regrets for Our Youth is an intelligent and balanced drama about wavering ideologies and personal allegiances set between 1933-46, the years of imperial Japan’s increasing militarisation through to its wartime defeat. Through these characters, Kurosawa demonstrates the care and compassion that should be shown to all humans, regardless of social status or wealth. With its accumulated wide-shots of threatening ranks of horsemen clutching banners assembled on distant hilltops and a standout scene in which overthrown warlord Hidetora wanders in a confused daze from the apocalyptic conflagration of his besieged castle, every image is so meticulously composed, every scene so perfectly constructed, as to provide the kind of satori moments of transcendent stupefaction all but lost in the CG age. Together with Godzilla, it’s the seven ronin, or masterless samurai, from this film who adorn a pair of massive murals outside the Toho Studios entrance in Setagaya, Tokyo. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. Yukie is the privileged daughter of a Kyoto University law professor who is controversially removed from his post for his leftist beliefs. The final sequence is as fitting a coda to the astounding career of this legendary filmmaker as one could ever wish for. Much like Throne of Blood, it takes Shakespeare to medieval Japan in spectacularly extravagant fashion. Registered charity 287780. In movies like Seven Samurai and High and Low, director Akira Kurosawa took the cinematic language of Hollywood and improved on it, creating a vigorous, muscular method of visual storytelling that became a stylistic playbook for the likes of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. He's already the subject of a Google doodle, now here's a guide to … The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. Set during the civil war of the late-16th-century Warring States period, Kurosawa’s massively influential magnum opus depicts a group of masterless samurai recruited by a farming community to fend off frequent raids by a gang of bandits. A stylistic similarity between the two films is the way in which Kurosawa transitions from one shot to the next using a wipe, something that George Lucas would emulate a little under two decades later. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a unique case of a filmmaker, even for an industry as diverse as the Japanese one, and not just for his additional roles as a film critic and a professor at Tokyo University of Arts. A loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, this tense police procedural drama focuses on the kidnapping of a successful businessman’s son, all within the broader context of a society that was rapidly becoming more affluent and seeing an increasingly pronounced wealth gap. First of all, it emerged through what might’ve been the single most frustrating shoot of the director’s career. We took all of the movies directed by Akira Kurosawa and looked at his Rotten Tomato Critic, Rotten Tomato User, IMDB, and Letterboxd scores, ranking them against one another to see which movies came out on top. This includes a complete list of films with which he was involved (including the films on which he worked as assistant director before becoming a full director), as well as his little-known contributions to theater, television and literature. The main character of Ikiru (which means ‘to live’), played by the long-standing Kurosawa mainstay Takashi Shimura, is a terminally ill bureaucrat who attempts to find a meaning and purpose to life before he passes away. The film would go on to be the third highest-grossing release in Japan for that year.While firmly entrenching Toshiro Mifune as a sta… Akira Kurosawa is an influential director. A ranking of all thirty films directed by Akira Kurosawa, presented in order of best to worst. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. Kurosawa would explore this line – between good and bad – in many of his films: Kagemusha (1980), in which a thief, acting as the double for a feudal lord, slowly assumes the characteristics of his master, is one example; contemporary crime dramas Stray Dog (1949), about a policeman searching for his stolen pistol, and High and Low (1963), about an investigation into a … The story of an undistinguished, time-serving civil servant who, upon learning he has stomach cancer, channels his energies into one final positive act, building a children’s playground in a disease-ridden slum quarter, is truly heart-rending stuff. One of the most beautiful anti-war films ever made, Renoir’s 1937 work is a powerful lamentation aimed at the death of the European aristocracy. His inability to secure funds for another film in Japan prompted this overseas shift, and the result is a magical tapestry of a world seldom seen by outsiders. The film portrays her relationships over the years with two of his former students, both rival for her affections, and her love affair and ensuing marriage to one of them, who is arrested for his anti-government activities and subsequently disappears from public view. Based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ran was the most complex and expensive film of Kurosawa’s career. In 1942, the respected Japanese screenwriter and director Mansaku Itami read a movie script titled A German at Daruma Temple. The obvious influence of these more monumental titles makes it easy to overlook the more humanistic, personal aspects of the master’s wide array of low-key, contemporary dramas and potent literary adaptations. Aside from the independently produced Dodes’ka-den in 1970 (remarkably, his first film in colour), he would not direct another film in his homeland for 15 years. Seven Samurai (1954)was Akira Kurosawa at his finest. a list of 30 titles The Best 20 Films of the Noughties (2000-2009). Very loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ikiru is one of Kurosawa’s most emotionally resonant films, one that leads the audience to contemplate life and legacy in a very subtle and poignant manner. Akira Kurosawa (Japanese: 黒澤明 Kurosawa Akira; March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and producer who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Released in 1954, the same fateful year as another one of the most well-known Japanese movies — the original Godzilla — Seven Samurai is the Kurosawa film that usually garners the most votes as his best. Posted on February 20, 2020 February 20, 2020 by Patrick Galvan. Here is a list of the best films of his career. The following is a list of works, both in film and other media, for which the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made some documented creative contribution. The enduring popularity of such titles lies in no small part to their open influence from Hollywood, particularly the westerns of directors such as John Ford. The costume designer deservedly won an Oscar. 3 Best Films of Akira Kurosawa. To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK", The Idiot (1951) | © japanesefilmarchive/Flickr. Kurosawa transports Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan in this masterly movie, which features a mesmerising performance by Toshiro Mifune. His films, like The Hidden Fortress, influenced popular culture and a generation of young filmmakers. Explore the history of film in list form. Fortunately an invitation from the Soviet Union’s Mosfilm to helm this Siberia-set 70mm adaptation of explorer Captain Vladimir Arsenyev’s 1923 autobiography put him firmly back on the international map. The Best Japanese Horror Movies From folk tales to body horror to monster movies, Japan’s cinema finds new ways to thrill and disturb audiences. The film is best remembered for the striking scene in which Mifune’s character, Macbeth’s equivalent, meets his death in a hail of arrows. BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, Watch No Regrets for Our Youth online on BFI Player, Watch Throne of Blood online on BFI Player. Following his reappearance on the world stage, Kurosawa returned to the world of jidaigeki epic with two international co-productions, Kagemusha (1980), which George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola persuaded 20th Century Fox to part-finance, and this lavish French-Japanese co-production, which saw him returning to Shakespeare with an adaptation of King Lear. His absent presence in the final sections provides a more down-to-earth mirror inverse to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The following is a list of works, both in film and other media, for which the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made some documented creative contribution. 10 Worst: The Idiot (1951) The Idiot is an adaptation of a Russian novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Kagemusha is one of Kurosawa’s most historically interesting films, for a number of reasons. 12:49:00 AM akira kurosawa , best movies list , biography , japan Edit J apanese auteur Akira Kurosawa is widely regarded as one of the greatest moviemakers of all time. Akira Kurosawa's 100 Favorite Movies Before his death in 1998, famed Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa discussed his top 100 films with his daughter, Kazuo. This includes a complete list of films with which he was involved (including the films on which he worked as assistant director before becoming a full director), as well as his little-known contributions to theater, television and literature. 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