Japan and the Japanese

Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.

Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.

Sep 30, 2017 — Before We Vanish, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, screens tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (October 1) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival.“This giddily enjoyable stew of absurdist gore from...

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

Mar 23, 2010 — In the Akira Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro is the sassy kid brotherto Yojimbo, and like many lighthearted younger siblings, it’s underrated. After Yojimbo achieved blockbuster status in 1961, Kurosawa took a story he’d already developed, about a semistrong but...

Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki stages a fearsome guerrilla night raid on an axis of oppression that includes the state, the church, the U.S. military occupation, and both the commercial exploitation of sexuality and the nonprofit pleasures of carnal love.

Apr 2, 2015 — Repertory Picks New York’s Japan Society is in the midst of celebrating two of Japanese cinema’s biggest stars in the screening series The Most Beautiful: The War Films of Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara. Focusing on films made before, during,...

Aug 28, 2020 — This week’s highlights feature paintings brought to life, pioneering citizen journalists, early “race films,” and the first Japanese wave.

From artistically refined epics to gory, pulpy spectacles, these films showcase the richness of a uniquely Japanese action subgenre.

Apr 11, 2023 — Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Kiyoshi Kurosawa praise Somai as a major influence, and Japan Society will present the first North American retrospective.