Criterion Collection (Firm)
Language
日本語
Description
A spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkable intimacy, Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports. Supervising a team of hundreds of technicians using more than a thousand cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious widescreen images, using cutting-edge telephoto lenses and exquisite slow motion to create lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry from the athletic drama surging all...
2) After life
Series
Language
日本語
Appears on list
Description
Hirokazu Kore-eda's revelatory international breakthrough is a bittersweet fantasia in which the recently deceased find themselves in a limbo realm where they must select a single cherished moment from their life.
3) Tampopo
Series
Criterion collection volume 868
Language
日本語
Formats
Description
The tale of an eccentric band of culinary ronin who guide the widow of a noodle shop owner on her quest for the perfect recipe.
4) Kwaidan
Series
Criterion collection volume 2540
Language
日本語
Description
After more than a decade of sober political dramas and social-minded periodpieces, the great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi shifted gears dramatically for this rapturously stylized quartet of ghost stories. Featuring colorfully surreal sets and luminous cinematography, these haunting tales of demonic comeuppance and spiritual trials, adapted from writer Lafcadio Hearn's collections of Japanese folklore, are existentially frightening and meticulously...
Series
Criterion collection volume 377
Language
日本語
Description
A young widow with family obligations, Keiko is the madam of an upstairs bar in the exclusive Ginza district of Tokyo in 1960. As she approaches 30, she realizes that her life is at a crossroads: she must either go into business and open her own bar or marry.
Series
Criterion collection volume 539
Language
日本語
Formats
Description
After learning that she will be sharing the summer with her father's new girlfriend, a young girl invites some friends to join her at her aunt's house instead. With a sick aunt, a bloodthirsty cat, and evil spirits lurking around, the girls find that it might have been better to stay at home. Bonus features include an experimental film, interviews, and an essay by Chuck Stephens.
Series
Criterion collection volume 295
Language
日本語
Description
Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking. A portrayal of post-war sexual revolution among Japan's young and privileged.
Series
Criterion collection volume 319
Language
日本語
Description
A young executive hunts down his father's killer. A tale about corruption in the boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan as seen through the rising executive eyes.
Series
Criterion collection volume 442
Language
日本語
Description
An elegant, emotional chronicle of a teacher's unwavering commitment to her students, her profession, and her sense of morality. It takes a simultaneously sober and sentimental look at the epic themes of aging, war, and death.
10) Kill! =: Kiru
Series
Criterion collection volume 313
Language
日本語
Description
A pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, a former farmer, dreams of being a samurai. The other, a former samurai, prefers living anonymously.
Series
Criterion collection volume 1125
Language
日本語
Description
"It's death, Japanese style, in the rollicking and wistful first feature from maverick writer-director Juzo Itami. In the wake of her lascivious father's sudden passing, a successful actor (Itami's wife and frequent collaborator, Nobuko Miyamoto) and her husband (Tsutomu Yamazaki) leave Tokyo and return to their family house to oversee a traditional funeral. Over the course of three days of mourning that bring illicit escapades in the woods, a surprisingly...
Series
Criterion collection volume 207
Language
日本語
Description
A small time porno filmmaker in Osaka, struggles to cope with the corrupt sexual mores in his family, the world outside, and in himself. He peddles his films to condescending executives and panders a little on the side, believing he provides a socially valuable service.
14) Silent Naruse
Language
日本語
Description
Flunky, work hard. Mikio Naruse's earliest available film, Flunky, work hard is the rare work by the director not to center around female characters. It is a charming, breezy short concerning an impoverished insurance salesman and his scrappy son.
No blood relation. A gripping early example of Mikio Naruse's cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu's famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood...
16) Late Ozu
Series
Language
日本語
Description
"Master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu directed fifty-three feature films over the course of his long career. Yet it was in the final decade of his life, his "old master" phase, that he entered his artistic prime. Centered more than ever on the modern sensibilities of the younger generation, these delicate family dramas are marked by an exquisite formal elegance and emotional sensitivity about birth and death, love and marriage, and all the accompanying joys...
Series
Criterion collection volume 316
Language
日本語
Description
An aging warlord decides to split his kingdom between his three sons, who will live in three separate castles. The two eldest sons are quite happy, but the youngest thinks his father has gone mad, and predicts that it won't be long until the two older brothers are fighting with each other.
18) Seven samurai
Series
Criterion collection volume 2
Language
日本語
Description
Tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire seven out-of-work warriors to protect them from invading bandits.
19) Rashomon
Series
Criterion collection volume 138
Language
日本語
Description
A riveting psychological thriller that investigates the nature of truth and the meaning of justice, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife. This eloquent masterwork and international sensation revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema, and a commanding new star.
20) Seven samurai
Series
Language
日本語
Appears on these lists
Asian American & Pacific Islander Month
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
MPL Criterion Collection
Asian American and Pacific Islander Month
MPL Criterion Collection
Description
This epic masterpiece is about a group of 16th century samurai who are hired to defend a small Japanese village that finds itself annually raided by an army of bandits who steal the meager crops harvested by the peasants. Tired of relinquishing their food supply but woefully inept in combat skills, the villagers decide to hire a band of samurai to protect them. In addition to the primary conflict between the villagers and the bandits, much of the...