Akira Kurosawa Filmography

Kurosawa

Actors: Sam Shepard, Paul Scofield, James Coburn, Clint Eastwood, Shinobu Hashimoto

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa was arguably the most important Japanese filmmaker who ever lived; he was certainly among the most revered and most influential. His award-winning feature Rashomon was one of the first major international successes in Japanese filmmaking, convincing many western cineastes for the Read More

Dora-Heita

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Koji Yakusho, Yuko Asano, Bunta Sugawara, Tsurutaro Kataoka

Synopsis: As the Japanese studios were declining in 1969, four legendary directors from that country's "golden age" of cinema -- Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and of course Akira Kurosawa -- banded together to start their own production company. The financial and critical failure of the Read More

Ame Agaru

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Akira Terao, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Shiro Mifune, Mieko Harada, Fumi Dan

Synopsis: Shortly before his death in 1998, Akira Kurosawa completed a screenplay entitled Ame Agaru, based on a short story by Shugoro Yamamoto. Kurosawa passed on before he could bring this story to the screen, but one of his assistants, Takashi Koizumi, has directed a film adapted from the script Read More

Madadayo

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Tatsuo Matsumara, Kyoko Kagawa, Hisashi Igawa

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa's swansong is a delicate, sentimental portrait of his long avowed hero, educator and literary figure Hyakken Uchida. At the film's opening, Uchida -- a professor of German literature at a military school where he is beloved for his wisdom and his impish humor -- is delivering his Read More

Rhapsody in August

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Richard Gere, Sachiko Murase, Mitsunori Isaki, Hidetaka Yoshioka

Synopsis: Master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa follows up on his phantasmorgic Dreams with this delicate tale about war and memory. The film centers on Kane (Sachiko Murase) a grandmother who lives on her traditional farm in the hills near Nagasaki. Her husband and a number of siblings died in the 1945 atomic Read More

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Akira Terao, Martin Scorsese, Mitsunori Isaki, Chishu Ryu, Mieko Harada

Synopsis: Following up on his critically acclaimed, blood-splattered epic Ran, master director Akira Kurosawa looks inward with this collection of eight brightly colored dreams. The first section centers on a young boy (Mitsunori Izaki), who witnesses a forest wedding procession of fox spirits in spite of Read More

A.K.

Actors: Akira Kurosawa

Synopsis: Director Chris Marker interviews and films Akira Kurosawa at work on one of his international blockbusters, Ran, in this interesting documentary that says as much about the process of filming as it does about the famed Japanese director himself. Clips from Ran are included, and comments from Read More

Ran

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada

Synopsis: Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false Read More

Kagemusha

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kenichi Hagiwara, Kota Yui, Shuji Otake

Synopsis: Just as many American studio-era directors found acclaim abroad that was denied them in their home country, by 1980 Akira Kurosawa's reputation outside Japan exceeded his esteem at home. As uncompromising as ever, he found considerable difficulty securing backing for his ambitious projects. Unsure Read More

Dersu Uzala

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Maxim Munzuk, Yuri Solomin, Vladimir Kremena, Alexandr Pyatkov, Dima Korshikov

Synopsis: A few months after his notorious suicide attempt, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was regenerated by the notion of helming the first Russian/Japanese co-production. Co-scripted and directed by Kurosawa, Dersu Uzala is the story of an elderly guide and Goldi hunter (Maxim Munzuk), who, at the Read More

Dodes'ka-Den

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Toshiyuki Tonomura

Synopsis: Dodes'ka-Den (aka Dodesukaden) was Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's first project since Red Beard (1965), and his first ever in color. Kurosawa focuses this time on Tokyo slum life. We watch as a variety of unfortunates debase themselves to survive, yet, somehow, emerge with more innate dignity Read More

Judo Saga

Crew: Screenwriter

Synopsis: In this drama, a student takes up judo to earn his peers' respect. As he studies and practices under the expert tutelage of his master, the youth is exposed to the spiritual side of the martial art. At first he resists these lessons. But when he fights his girlfriend's father, he begins to gain a Read More

Red Beard

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Kyoko Kagawa, Miyuki Kuwano

Synopsis: In 1820, young Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) completes his medical education in Nagasaki and returns to his native Edo hoping both to marry the daughter of a wealthy man and to achieve affluence himself through his medical practice. He happens to visit the famed Koishikawa clinic for the indigent Read More

Sanjuro

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiju Kobayashi, Reiko Dan, Takashi Shimura

Synopsis: Set in the mid-19th century when the disintegration of a rigid social structure was turning the once wealthy into paupers, or vice-versa, this kinetic drama by acclaimed Akira Kurosawa features the hero Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), one of many samurai whose once traditional positions were fast Read More

High and Low

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Nakadai

Synopsis: Based on King's Ransom, an "87th Precinct" novel by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter), High and Low stars Toshiro Mifune as Gondo, a wealthy industrialist. Gondo is contacted by a gang of kidnappers, who inform him that they've kidnapped his son. The crooks demand a huge ransom for the boy's return Read More

Yojimbo

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono, Tatsuya Nakadai, Isuzu Yamada, Seizaburo Kawazu, Hiroshi Tachikawa, Daisuke Kato

Synopsis: Toshiro Mifune portrays a Samurai who finds himself in the middle of a feud-torn Japanese village. Neither side is particularly honorable, but Mifune is hungry and impoverished, so he agrees to work as bodyguard (or Yojimbo) for a silk merchant (Kamatari Fujiwara) against a sake merchant (Takashi Shimura Read More

The Bad Sleep Well

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune

Synopsis: In this engaging drama, acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa deftly splices together the nuances of hypocrisy, old feudal misconceptions lingering in modern corruption, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The rotten corporate world is taken on by Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), who is looking for Read More

Saga of the Vagabonds

Crew: Screenwriter

Synopsis: Released in Japan as Sengoku Gunto-Den, Saga of the Vagabonds stars Toshiro Mifune as a feudal bandit. Koji Tsuruta, entrusted with the money that will be used to fund the local warlords' battle against Mifune, is waylaid and robbed. Accused of stealing the money, the disgruntled Tsuruta casts Read More

The Hidden Fortress

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Misa Uehara, Kamatari Fujiwara, Minoru Chiaki, Susumu Fujita

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (original Japanese title: Kakushi Toride No San Akunin) stars Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as a pair of misfit soldiers. Running from the enemy after a disastrous defeat, the two soldiers fall in with general Toshiro Mifune, who is in search of a huge Read More

Throne of Blood

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru Chiaki, Takashi Shimura, Akira Kubo, Takamaru Sasaki

Synopsis: Macbeth is reimagined as a samurai in feudal Japan in director Akira Kurosawa's classic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Familiar with Orson Welles's more faithful adaptation, Kurosawa chose to place a more personal stamp on his version by translating the events and characters to Read More

The Lower Depths

Crew: Director, Editor, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Kyoko Kagawa, Bokuzen Hidari, Ganjiro Nakamura

Synopsis: Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa transferred the setting of Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths from Imperial Russia to his own country's Edo Period--which, like Gorky's 19th-century setting, was an era of great cultural advances, offset by the miseries of those who weren't in the aristocracy. Read More

Record of a Living Being

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Eiko Miyoshi, Masao Shimizu, Yutaka Sada

Synopsis: When an elderly, wealthy man decides that nuclear holocaust is eminent in his country, he decides to move his family to Brazil at all costs--a place which, for some mysterious reason, he believes to be safe. His family refuses to move because they fear that the move will jeopardize their financial Read More

Seven Samurai

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki, Daisuke Kato, Ko (Isao) Kimura

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa's epic tale concerns honor and duty during a time when the old traditional order is breaking down. The film opens with master samurai Kambei (Takashi Shimura) posing as a monk to save a kidnapped farmer's child. Impressed by his selflessness and bravery, a group of farmers begs him Read More

Ikiru

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagiri, Makoto Kobori

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru details the existential struggle of one ordinary man in his desperate search for purpose. Upon learning he has terminal stomach cancer, a low-level government bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the year he has left Read More

The Idiot

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune, Setsuko Hara, Yoshiko Kuga

Synopsis: A former soldier is branded an idiot because of his epileptic seizures caused by wartime experiences. He shows unbridled compassion for people after he moves in with friends of his family as he tries to help a young man ruined by the war and a woman hounded by a wealthy but cruel suitor. All the Read More

Rashomon

Crew: Director, Editor, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki

Synopsis: This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit Read More

Scandal

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Yoshiko Yamaguchi, Takashi Shimura

Synopsis: Released in Japan as Shubun, Scandal was the eleventh film directed by Akira Kurosawa (it was produced just prior to his more famous Rashomon). The director described it as a "protest" film about press journalism. The film sets forth the theory that the postwar Japanese press was too free in its Read More

The Quiet Duel

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Noriko Sengoku, Kenjiro Uemura, Chieko Nakakita, Miki Sanjo

Synopsis: A dedicated army surgeon finds his once-bright future suddenly obscured when he contracts syphilis while performing a life-saving operation in this early collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune. Contaminated with a disease that was virtually incurable in 1940s Japan Read More

Stray Dog

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji, Ko (Isao) Kimura

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa directs the black-and-white 1949 film noir Nora Inu (released in the U.S. in 1963 as Stray Dog). In his third film with Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune plays young police detective Murakami. One summer day on a crowded bus in Tokyo, his gun is stolen by a pickpocket. Rather than face the Read More

Shozo

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Kuniko Miyake, Ichiro Sugai, Mitsuko Miura, Kuniko Igawa

Drunken Angel

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Reisaburo Yamamoto, Chieko Nakakita

Synopsis: Originally titled Yoidore tenshi, Drunken Angel was director Akira Kurosawa's first "auteur" project. "I finally discovered myself," he explained later. "It was my picture: I was doing it and no one else." Takashi Shimura plays an alcoholic doctor, running a fleabitten clinic in the slums of Read More

One Wonderful Sunday

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa directs this romantic comedy about a pair of lovers struggling to have a pleasant Sunday outing. A young laborer named Yuzo (Isao Numazaki) and his fiancée, Masako (Chieko Nakakita), meet at the train station on their day off. With the weather beautiful and only a scant 35 yen in Read More

No Regrets for Our Youth

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Based on the Takikawa incident of 1933, in which a prominent professor was forced out of his position by the government for his leftist views, Akira Kurosawa directs this socially minded tale about a pure-hearted lass coming to terms with the corrupt nature of the world. Though professor Yagihara Read More

Those Who Make Tomorrow

Crew: Director

Sanshiro Sugata 2

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Synopsis: This 1945 Japanese film by renowned director Akira Kurosawa, is a sequel to its better known predecessor, Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Both concern the relationship between Shogoro Yano (Denjiro Okochi), the founder of the martial arts discipline of Judo, and Sanshiro Sugata (Susumu Fujita), one of his Read More

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Hanshiro Iwai, Susumu Fujita, Kenichi Enomoto, Denjiro Okochi

Synopsis: Akira Kurosawa's Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail was put together at the last minute when Kurosawa's plan to direct a costume picture called Doko Kono Yari fell through (the producer couldn't get any horses!) Utilizing the costumes, sets and actors already commissioned, Kurosawa spent one long Read More

The Most Beautiful

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Following up on his successful directorial debut, soon-to-be cinematic master Akira Kurosawa helms this war-era melodrama about female factory workers dutifully toiling for the greater good of the Imperial war effort. Under the watchful eye of their paternalistic factory manager (played by Kurosawa Read More

Sanshiro Sugata

Crew: Director, Editor

Actors: Susumu Fujita, Denjiro Okochi, Yukiko Todoroki, Ryonosuke Tsukigata, Akitake Kono

Synopsis: This first effort by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was originally released as Sanshiro Sugata . The film, made under reasonably smooth conditions despite the war, is based on a best-selling novel about the creation of Judo. Most of the film explores the relationship between the creator of this Read More

Uma

Crew: Editor, First Assistant Director

Synopsis: A young girl, Ine, from a poor village family wants nothing more than to own a horse. Her family soon takes in a pregnant mare which they have signed on to care for over the winter. Financial troubles push the family towards the edge of ruin and neither they nor the horse is eating much. The horse Read More