Search:

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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
Madadayo

Akira Kurosawa
1993 • 134 minutes • 1.33:1 • Japan
Editions: Collector’s Sets, Hulu Plus

Kurosawa’s final film is a tribute to Hyakken Uchida (Tatsuo Matsmura), an educator and writer of enormously popular aphoristic stories. Based on Uchida’s writings, the film pieces a narrative together with distinct episodes—anecdotes and parties, ceremonies and celebrations.

Out of print Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
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.

Learn more »
Heat and Dust

James Ivory
1983 • 130 minutes • 1.78:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

Blending east with west, and moving effortlessly between vibrant modern-day India and the splendors of the Raj, Heat and Dust concerns Anne, a young woman drawn to India by her desire to unravel the scandal surrounding her great-aunt’s seduction in the 1920s by a handsome Indian prince.

Learn more »
Quartet

James Ivory
1981 • 101 minutes • 1.78:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

Dazzlingly acted by Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Anthony Higgins, and Isabelle Adjani, Quartet is the story of a girl who, adrift with her feckless husband amidst the literati of glittering Paris in the 1920s, becomes entrapped by a rich and sybaritic English couple.

Learn more »
Maurice

James Ivory
1987 • 140 minutes • 1.66:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

Set against the stifling conformity of pre–World War I English society, Maurice is a story of coming to terms with one’s sexuality and identity in the face of disapproval and misunderstanding. Maurice Hall (James Wilby) and Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) find themselves falling in love at Cambridge.

Learn more »
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Simon Callow
1991 • 100 minutes • 1.77:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

Merchant Ivory’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, based on the novella by Carson McCullers and the play by Edward Albee, is both a grotesque black comedy and a prime slice of Southern Gothic set in a poverty-stricken rural community dominated by the curious, androgynous Miss Amelia.

Learn more »
The Deceivers

Nicholas Meyer
1988 • 102 minutes • 1.77:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

India, 1825: The country is being ravaged by the Thugees, cult members also known as the “Deceivers,” who commit robbery and ritualistic murder. Appalled by their activities, English officer William Savage (Pierce Brosnan) disguises himself and infiltrates their ranks.

Learn more »
The Europeans

James Ivory
1979 • 91 minutes • 1.78:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

This entertaining film, from a delicious early novel by Henry James, takes place in a New England Arcadia that stands for everything beautiful, pure, and good. Into this Eden come a sophisticated European brother and sister who turn up unexpectedly on the doorstep of their staid American cousins.

Learn more »
The Householder

James Ivory
1963 • 101 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

The Householder, the first collaboration between Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, is the story of a young, underpaid Delhi schoolteacher (Shashi Kapoor) who marries and then, little by little, gets to know his young wife, Indu (Leela Naidu), during their first year together.

Learn more »
Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures

James Ivory
1978 • 83 minutes • 1.33:1 • United Kingdom
Edition: DVD

Peggy Ashcroft and Larry Pine play rapacious art collectors who come to the decaying Art Deco palace of a young Maharaja (Victor Banerjee) to examine a legendary collection of Indian miniature paintings.

Learn more »