Films
Read about the filmsFind a film by title, director, mood or the time you have.
Three hours that fly. The template for the epic.
Before the icon came the nightmare: destruction with a memory.
One crime, four truths, no easy answers.
Quiet, domestic, and devastating in the softest way.
A ransom demand turns one room, then an entire city, into evidence.
A ronin requests ritual suicide and calmly opens a clan’s polished history.
A wandering samurai walks into a feud and starts rearranging the odds.
A life measured in paperwork discovers one unfinished thing that matters.
Two brothers learn that their father’s place in the adult world does not match the hero they imagined.
A travelling actor returns to a provincial town, where an old relationship and an unacknowledged son disturb the troupe’s temporary calm.
A mother gives up much of her own future to fund her son’s education. When aspiration meets adult reality, love becomes difficult to separate from disappointment.
A widowed teacher tries to secure his son’s future, yet the decisions he makes keep them apart. Ozu turns the bond between parent and child into a conflict over duty.
A doctor tries to treat a gangster with tuberculosis in postwar Tokyo. Their uneasy bond puts care up against pride, with Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune pulling in opposite directions.
A father and daughter share a peaceful home that social expectation begins to rearrange.
A stolen police pistol sends a young detective through the heat and desperation of post-war Tokyo.
Noriko’s family wants to find her a husband. Ozu follows the wider household and its neighbours as her own wishes unsettle what everyone assumes a marriage should accomplish.
An older woman recalls the successive roles society has assigned her, from court attendant to sex worker. Kinuyo Tanaka gives continuity to a life repeatedly redirected by status and power.
War, ambition, and a ghostly shore draw two families away from the lives they have.
A family torn apart by slavery carries one moral instruction across years of cruelty.
A woman returns to postwar Japan and tries to revive a wartime affair with a man whose promises repeatedly dissolve into avoidance.
Women working in a Tokyo brothel try to secure a future while money, family and changing public attitudes restrict their choices. Mizoguchi keeps several lives in view rather than offering one representative victim.
Kurosawa relocates Macbeth to feudal Japan, where a warrior’s rise is inseparable from ambition and betrayal. Fog, landscape and Noh-derived performance give the familiar tragedy a different dramatic language.
Two sisters face a family past that refuses to stay separate from their adult lives. Marital conflict and an unwanted pregnancy give Ozu’s domestic world an unusually harsh emotional register.
A general escorts a defeated clan’s princess and treasure through enemy territory, accompanied by two unreliable peasants. The mission has a clear goal and a persistently awkward human complication.
A brief affair in Hiroshima opens a difficult passage between public catastrophe and private memory.
A young executive pursues the person responsible for his father’s death. Kurosawa carries the revenge story into the offices and hierarchies of postwar corporate Japan.
A family’s island life depends on the repeated labour of bringing water across the sea.
A scruffy, experienced samurai helps a group of idealistic young warriors confront corruption within their clan. His methods make their ideas of proper conduct look dangerously naive.
A rural woman negotiates decades of upheaval, exploitation and opportunity in twentieth-century Japan.
Two women survive a civil war by ambushing lost soldiers in tall reeds until desire unsettles their arrangement.
A yakuza released from prison meets a reckless gambler, and their search for excitement draws them towards danger.
An amateur entomologist is trapped in a sand pit with a widow whose nightly labour keeps their home from being buried.
An ambitious young doctor joins a clinic serving poor patients and clashes with its formidable director. His education becomes a test of what medical skill is actually for.
A hit man caught between rival gangs must negotiate a crime world that increasingly closes around him.
An assassin botches a job and becomes a target in a crime story driven by strange obsessions and abrupt turns.
A condemned man survives his execution, and the authorities struggle to make their punishment proceed.
Love, rivalry, performance, and filmmaking overlap within Tokyo’s late-1960s gay counterculture.
A timid accountant travels west, becomes an outlaw by accident, and drifts toward a death he barely understands.
Still deciding? Ask Momo.
Read a film closely
Character companions, film comparisons and a closer look at particular scenes.
- Seven Samurai
Who are the seven samurai?
Names, actors and roles to keep the seven apart.
- The Wages of Fear
The original, Sorcerer, or the remake?
Three films compared before you choose.
- Breathless
What disappears in a jump cut?
A diagram of the time Godard leaves out.
- Wild Strawberries
What do the dreams mean?
Trace the clocks, mirror and final scene.
After watching · Spoilers - Persona
Why hear the same speech twice?
Follow who speaks and whose face fills the frame.
After watching · Spoilers - Bicycle Thieves
What happens at the end?
The final encounter, seen through father and son.
After watching · Spoilers