Takashi Shimura

A dying man devotes his last months to building a children's playground.

This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking semidocumentary approach, The Most Beautiful is a revealing look at Japanese women of the era and anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.

Japanese villagers hire a team of traveling samurai to defend them against a bandit attack.

During a sweltering summer, a rookie homicide detective tries to track down his stolen Colt pistol.

The monster is awakened by an undersea explosion and wreaks havoc on the citizens of Tokyo.

In medieval Japan, four people offer conflicting accounts of a rape and murder.

Transposing the action to sixteenth century Japan, Kurosawa's re-telling of Shakespeare's Macbeth remains immensely successful. A truly remarkable film, Throne of Blood manages to combine beauty and terror to produce a mood of truly haunting power. Starring the irrepressible Toshiro Mifune as the doomed warlord Washizu and a wonderfully creepy turn by Isuzu Yamada as the Lady Macbeth inspired Asaji, the film shows Kurosawa's familiar mastery of atmosphere and action combined with the savagery of war.

Everything comes full circle when Zatoichi returns to his hometown. Unfortunately, he finds that a childhood friend has become a feared crime lord, keeping the locals in debt and bilking them of their rice. Capping off Zatoichi’s feature film era before he made the transition to television in 1974, this chapter is suffused with melancholy, closing the series on a note of seriousness and emotional heft that it has well earned.

The wandering swordsman finds himself in a small village that serves as hideout for a band of fugitives who control the town officials and enforce brutal slave labor in the local silk mill. This lean and mean entry is packed with coldhearted villainy and rough justice, but it finds its heart in the great Takashi Shimura (Ikiru), who plays a kindly country doctor caught up in a violent world.

A surgeon gets syphilis from a patient when he cuts himself during an operation. The doctor's life is destroyed, but unlike the patient, he doesn't destroy others along with him.

American nuclear weapons testing results in the creation of a seemingly unstoppable, dinosaur-like beast.

After a meteorite unleashes a three-headed beast upon Tokyo, Mothra tries to unite with Godzilla and Rodan to battle the extraterrestrial threat.

This time around, Godzilla is reawakened by an A-Bomb again but decides to wreak havoc on Osaka.

This time around, Godzilla is reawakened by an A-Bomb again but decides to wreak havoc on Osaka.

Sanshiro, a strong but stubborn youth, abandons his jujutsu training to master the art of judo from the master Shogoro Yano by combining the competitive elements of the art with the quiet, meditative aspects of the fighting style.