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Sanshiro Sugata

Akira Kurosawa
1943 • 79 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Kurosawa’s effortless debut is a thrilling martial arts action tale, but it’s also a moving story of moral education that’s quintessential Kurosawa.

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The Most Beautiful

Akira Kurosawa
1944 • 85 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet it anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.

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Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two

Akira Kurosawa
1945 • 83 minutes • 1.37:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original.

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The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

Akira Kurosawa
1945 • 59 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint.

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No Regrets for Our Youth

Akira Kurosawa
1946 • 110 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In Akira Kurosawa’s first film after the end of World War II, future beloved Ozu regular Setsuko Hara gives an astonishing performance as Yukie, who transforms herself from genteel bourgeois daughter to independent social activist during a tumultuous decade in Japanese history.

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One Wonderful Sunday

Akira Kurosawa
1947 • 109 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

This affectionate paean to young love is also a frank examination by Akira Kurosawa of the harsh realities of postwar Japan. During a Sunday trip into war-ravaged Tokyo, Yuzo and Masako look for work and lodging, as well as affordable entertainments to pass the time.

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Scandal

Akira Kurosawa
1950 • 105 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

A handsome, suave Toshiro Mifune lights up the screen as painter Ichiro, whose circumstantial meeting with a famous singer is twisted by the tabloid press into a torrid affair. Ichiro files a lawsuit against the seedy gossip magazine, but his lawyer, Hiruta (Takashi Shimura), is playing both sides.

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The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa
1951 • 166 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul’s reintegration into society—updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan’s postwar aimlessness—was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this “folly” looks ever more fascinating.

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White Mane

Albert Lamorisse
1952 • 39 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

In the south of France, in a vast plain region called the Camargue, lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him.

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I Live in Fear

Akira Kurosawa
1955 • 103 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

I Live in Fear presents Toshiro Mifune as an elderly, stubborn businessman so fearful of a nuclear attack that he resolves to move his reluctant family to South America. Kurosawa depicts a society emerging from the shadows but still terrorized by memories of the past and anxieties for the future.

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The Red Balloon

Albert Lamorisse
1956 • 34 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Editions: DVD, Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus, iTunes

Albert Lamorisse’s exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris.

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The Lower Depths

Akira Kurosawa
1957 • 125 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Working with his most celebrated actor, Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa faithfully adapts Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play, keeping the original’s focus on the conflict between illusion and reality.

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