The Retired Samurai

A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the...

Akira Kurosawa's lauded feudal epic presents the tale of a petty thief who is recruited to impersonate Shingen, an aging warlord, in order to avoid...

With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic...

Seibei Iguchi leads a difficult life as a low ranking samurai at the turn of the nineteenth century. A widower with a meager income, Seibei struggles...

Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Kurosawa's tightly paced, beautifully composed "Sanjuro." In this companion piece and...

Discovering Paris under the German occupation through the story of an SS soldier and more generally of Wehrmacht soldiers allows us to follow the...

Genjiro was a samurai in the past, but he became a Yakuza, a dandy with a tattoo of red peonies, he helps his younger brother who is caught up in a...

The story of a mother whose two young daughters are kidnapped by her abusive ex-husband—and her all-consuming fight to get them back.

1953 jidaigeki directed by Nobuo Nakagawa of Jigoku and Ghost of Yotsuya fame.

The main character, Baian Fujieda, is a dark hero who has two faces: one as a skilled acupuncturist who saves lives, and the other as a criminal who...

During the ultra-violent era of the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate one man rose above the rest with his ideas of how to overthrow the corrupt...

Takizawa Bakin, a popular Edo period author, begins to recount a story he is planning in front of his friend, the artist Katsushika Hokusai. The...