Jan 5, 2004 — “Sometimes I think of my death,” Kurosawa has written: “I think of ceasing to be . . . and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” The story of a man who knows he is going to die, the...

Nov 19, 1990 — By facing death, Akira Kurosawa fashions an affirmation of life, characteristically clear-headed in its exploration of man’s fate.

Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...

The legendary actor shares his love for the Akira Kurosawa classics Red Beard and Ikiru, recalls how Tatsuya Nakadai was his teacher when he first began acting, admires the visual storytelling of City Lights, and shouts out his latest collaborator,...

Jan 6, 2023 — Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, screenwriter, and song lyricist. Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he moved to Britain with his parents when he was five years old. His books, translated into over fifty languages, have earned him...

We were excited to welcome author and TCM host Alicia Malone into the closet, where she offered up quick takes on Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

Aug 17, 2021 — Songbook It will always figure for me as an interval of eerily suspended time: not only a formative moviegoing experience but a jolt of awareness when the line between screen and life dissolved. In a dimly lit Tokyo cabaret the...

Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.

Oct 10, 2012 — Among Kurosawa’s films set in the twentieth century, Ikiru—which you can watch for free on Hulu this week—is probably the most widely seen and beloved. This soul-searching morality tale concerns Watanabe (the haunting Takashi Shimura), a widower and city worker...

Dec 28, 2022 — We’re getting real in January with a spotlight on cinema verité, a movement that revolutionized documentary filmmaking.