Directing

Akira Kurosawa

Born March 23, 1910 · Shinagawa, Tokyo Prefecture, Japan

Died September 6, 1998 · aged 88

Akira Kurosawa (黒澤明) was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career spanning over five decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He displayed a bold, dynamic style, strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it; he was involved with all aspects of film production. Kurosawa entered the Ja…

Known For

Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai · 1954

MovieActionDrama

A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven · 2016

The Magnificent Seven

MovieAdventureAction

Looking to mine for gold, greedy industrialist Bartholomew Bogue seizes control of the Old West town of Rose Creek. With their lives in jeopardy, Emma Cullen and other desperate residents turn to bounty hunter Sam Chisolm for help. Chisolm recruits an eclectic group of gunslingers to take on Bogue and his ruthless henchmen. With a deadly showdown on the horizon, the seven mercenaries soon find themselves fighting for more than just money once the bullets start to fly.

Highest 2 Lowest

Highest 2 Lowest · 2025

Highest 2 Lowest

MovieThrillerCrime

When a titan music mogul, widely known as having the "best ears in the business", is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.

High and Low

High and Low · 1963

MovieDramaCrime

A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.

A Fistful of Dollars

A Fistful of Dollars · 1964

A Fistful of Dollars

The Man With No Name enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers and sheriff John Baxter. When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit.

Ran

MovieActionDrama

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven · 1960

The Magnificent Seven

An oppressed Mexican peasant village hires seven gunfighters to help defend their homes.

Ikiru

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

Filmography

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Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai · 1954

MovieActionDrama

A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.

Director

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven · 2016

The Magnificent Seven

MovieAdventureAction

Looking to mine for gold, greedy industrialist Bartholomew Bogue seizes control of the Old West town of Rose Creek. With their lives in jeopardy, Emma Cullen and other desperate residents turn to bounty hunter Sam Chisolm for help. Chisolm recruits an eclectic group of gunslingers to take on Bogue and his ruthless henchmen. With a deadly showdown on the horizon, the seven mercenaries soon find themselves fighting for more than just money once the bullets start to fly.

Original Film Writer

Highest 2 Lowest

Highest 2 Lowest · 2025

Highest 2 Lowest

MovieThrillerCrime

When a titan music mogul, widely known as having the "best ears in the business", is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Original Film Writer

High and Low

High and Low · 1963

MovieDramaCrime

A Yokohama shoe executive faces a wrenching choice when kidnappers mistakenly seize his chauffeur’s son but demand the ransom anyway.

Director

A Fistful of Dollars

A Fistful of Dollars · 1964

A Fistful of Dollars

The Man With No Name enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers and sheriff John Baxter. When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit.

Original Story

Ran

MovieActionDrama

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

Director

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven · 1960

The Magnificent Seven

An oppressed Mexican peasant village hires seven gunfighters to help defend their homes.

Original Film Writer

Ikiru

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

Director

Red Beard

Red Beard · 1965

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.

Director

Kagemusha

Kagemusha · 1980

MovieActionDrama

A feudal epic presenting the tale of a petty thief who is recruited to impersonate Shingen, an aging warlord, in order to avoid attacks by competing clans. The impostor becomes comfortable living his life among nobility, but his responsibilities to his station grow more demanding the longer he occupies it.

Director

Living

London, 1953. Mr. Williams, a veteran civil servant, is an important cog within the city's bureaucracy as it struggles to rebuild in the aftermath of World War II. Buried under paperwork at the office and lonely at home, his life has long felt empty and meaningless. Then a devastating medical diagnosis forces him to take stock, and to try and grasp some fulfilment before it passes permanently beyond reach.

Original Film Writer

Dreams

MovieFantasyDrama

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

Director

Rashomon

Rashomon · 1950

MovieCrimeDrama

Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.

Director

Throne of Blood

Throne of Blood · 1957

Throne of Blood

MovieDramaHistory

Returning to their lord's castle, samurai warriors Washizu and Miki are waylaid by a spirit who predicts their futures. When the first part of the spirit's prophecy comes true, Washizu's scheming wife, Asaji, presses him to speed up the rest of the spirit's prophecy by murdering his lord and usurping his place. Director Akira Kurosawa's resetting of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in feudal Japan is one of his most acclaimed films.

Director

Last Man Standing

Last Man Standing · 1996

Last Man Standing

MovieActionCrime

John Smith is a mysterious stranger who is drawn into a vicious war between two Prohibition-era gangs. In a dangerous game, he switches allegiances from one to another, offering his services to the highest bidder. As the death toll mounts, Smith takes the law into his own hands in a deadly race to stay alive.

Original Film Writer

Runaway Train

Runaway Train · 1985

MovieActionThriller

A hardened convict and a younger prisoner escape from a brutal prison in the middle of winter only to find themselves on an out-of-control train with a female railway worker while being pursued by the vengeful head of security.

Original Film Writer

Yojimbo

Yojimbo · 1961

MovieDramaThriller

A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin convinces both silk merchant Tazaemon and sake merchant Tokuemon to hire him as a personal bodyguard, then artfully sets in motion a full-scale gang war between the two ambitious and unscrupulous men.

Director

Django

MovieActionWestern

A coffin-dragging gunslinger and a prostitute become embroiled in a bitter feud between a Klan of Southern racists and a band of Mexican Revolutionaries.

Original Film Writer

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai · 1999

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

MovieCrimeDrama

A Black hitman who models after the samurai of old finds himself targeted for death by the mob.

Thanks

Rhapsody in August

Rhapsody in August · 1991

Rhapsody in August

An elderly Nagasaki hibakusha spends a summer caring for her four grandchildren, whose curiosity about the 1945 bombing stirs buried memories and moral questions. When an American nephew from Hawaii visits, the family confronts grief, guilt, and the possibility of reconciliation across generations.

Director

Drunken Angel

Drunken Angel · 1948

In postwar Tokyo, a blunt, alcohol-soaked doctor diagnoses a swaggering young yakuza with tuberculosis, forging an uneasy bond that’s tested when the gangster’s ruthless former boss returns and drags him back toward the swampy underworld he can’t escape.

Director

Inferno

Inferno · 1999

MovieActionDrama

Eddie Lomax is a drifter who has been in a suicidal funk since the death of his close friend Johnny. Riding his motorcycle into a small desert town where Johnny once lived, Lomax is confronted by a gang of toughs, who beat him and steal his bike. However, Lomax is not a man to take an injustice lying down, and soon he begins exacting a violent revenge on the men who stole his motorcycle, with local handyman Jubal Early lending a hand and several area ladies offering aid and comfort.

Original Film Writer

The Hidden Fortress

The Hidden Fortress · 1958

The Hidden Fortress

MovieDramaAction

In feudal Japan, during a bloody war between clans, two cowardly and greedy peasants, soldiers of a defeated army, stumble upon a mysterious man who guides them to a fortress hidden in the mountains.

Director

Battle Beyond the Stars

Battle Beyond the Stars · 1980

Battle Beyond the Stars

MovieScience FictionAction

A young farmer assembles a band of diverse mercenaries to defend his peaceful planet from an evil tyrant.

Original Story

The South Bank Show

The South Bank Show · 1978

The South Bank Show

SeriesDocumentaryTalk

The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.

Kaze no Yojimbo

Kaze no Yojimbo · 2001

Kaze no Yojimbo

SeriesDramaAnimation

George Kodama is investigating an incident that occurred in the small town of Kimujuku over 15 years ago. George is soon caught up in the middle of a bloody gang fight for control of the town.

Original Film Writer

Samurai 7

Samurai 7 · 2004

SeriesAction & AdventureAnimation

As villages perish under the thumb of a cruel race of warriors, a young priestess named Kirara travels the countryside gathering stray samurais.

Original Concept