Akira Kurosawa

1h 19m

The debut, about judo. Wartime censors cut it and only the shortened print survives.

1h 25m

A propaganda film about women in a lens factory. He married its lead.

1h 23m

A sequel he made under orders and openly disliked.

59m

Fifty-nine minutes, shelved by the occupation authorities until 1952.

1h 50m

His first film with a woman at the centre, and his first postwar political statement.

1h 48m

A couple with almost no money spending a day in ruined Tokyo.

1h 38m

The first film with Toshiro Mifune, and the first that is recognisably his.

2h 2m

A detective hunting his own stolen pistol through a sweltering Tokyo. The template for the buddy procedural.

1h 35m

A surgeon infected during wartime surgery. Mifune, cast against everything.

1h 28m

Four irreconcilable accounts of one crime. Won at Venice and opened Japanese cinema to the West.

1h 45m

A libel case against a gossip magazine. Minor, and unusually angry.

2h 46m

Dostoevsky in Hokkaido. The studio cut it from 265 minutes and the long version is lost.

2h 23m

A bureaucrat with months to live decides to build a playground. His most humane film.

3h 27m

Three and a half hours that go quickly. Every assemble-a-team film since is downstream of it.

1h 43m

Mifune at thirty-five playing an old man terrified of nuclear war.

2h 5m

Gorky relocated to Edo-era Japan, and almost entirely confined to one room.

1h 50m

Macbeth as Noh theatre in the fog. The arrow sequence used real archers firing at Mifune.

2h 19m

Two bickering peasants escorting a princess. George Lucas took the structure for Star Wars.

2h 31m

Hamlet as postwar corporate corruption. The opening wedding scene is a masterclass.

1h 50m

A ronin plays two gangs against each other. Remade without permission as A Fistful of Dollars.

1h 36m

The Yojimbo sequel, lighter and funnier, ending on the most famous cut in Japanese cinema.

2h 23m

A kidnapping that takes the wrong child. Half chamber drama, half street procedural.

3h 5m

A clinic for the poor, and the last of the sixteen films he made with Mifune.

2h 20m

His first colour film. It failed, and he attempted suicide the following year.

2h 24m

Made in the Soviet Union in Russian, and won the Foreign Language Oscar. The comeback.

3h 0m

A thief impersonating a dead warlord. Financed by Lucas and Coppola when Japan would not.

2h 42m

King Lear with three sons, at seventy-five, on the largest scale he ever worked.

1h 59m

Eight of his own dreams, filmed. Martin Scorsese plays Van Gogh in one.

1h 38m

A grandmother who survived Nagasaki, and Richard Gere as her American nephew.

2h 14m

A retired professor and his former students. The last film, and gentle about ending.