Arguably the most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa had a career that spanned from the Second World War to the early nineties and that stands as a monument of artistic and personal achievement.

Nov 18, 2016 — A dazzling mix of folklore, myth, and the director’s own nighttime visions, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams represents a late-career burst of creativity from one of the masters of Japanese cinema. Over the course of the film’s eight surreal episodes, Kurosawa moves...

Sep 30, 2010 — American film legend Arthur Penn, the director of The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man, and other classic movies, died this week at age eighty-eight. When we heard the sad news, we thought of this short reminiscence...

Jul 16, 2025 — Opening in New York this week, the program is heading next to Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver.

Mar 19, 2014 — Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress has long been cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars. An avid fan of Kurosawa’s, Lucas would eventually work with the Japanese auteur, executive producing the international version of his 1980 Kagemusha. In...

Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...

Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Jan 7, 2016 — While in Tokyo to work on Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film, our technical director got a glimpse at some of the filmmaker’s original drawings that he used to shoot the movie.