Movies: Shinichirô Ikebe

A collection of magical tales based upon the actual dreams of director Akira Kurosawa....

Akira Kurosawa's lauded feudal epic presents the tale of a petty thief who is recruited to impersonate Shingen, an aging warlord, in order to avoid attacks by competing clans. When Shingen dies, his generals reluctantly agree to have the impostor tak...

A thief, a murderer, and a charming lady-killer, Iwao Enokizu is on the run from the police....

In a small village in a valley everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave the village and go to a certain mountain top to die. If anyone should refuse they would disgrace their family. Old Orin is 69. This winter it is her turn to go to the mounta...

The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, whose husband was one of 80,000 human beings killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii wh...

Based on the life of Hyakken Uchida, a Japanese author and academic. The film opens with Uchida resigning his job as a German professor at the onset of WWII. The story is told mostly in vignettes as he is cared for by former students in his old age....

A businessman kills his adulterous wife and is sent to prison. After his release, he opens a barbershop and meets new people, talking to almost no one except for an eel he befriended while in prison....

A down-and-out businessman travels to a seaside town, where he meets a woman with unusual sexual powers....

A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest....

Winter Days is a 2003 animated film, directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. It is based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the t...

At the time between the World Wars, Japan is involved in empire-building throughout East and Southeast Asia. After a brief career as a low-level military adventurer, Iheiji sets up chains of brothels throughout Asia. As Japan's power in the region gr...

Takeshi Kitano plays a version of himself in which he's a struggling director cycling through a number of different genres in an effort to complete his latest project....

The film depicts carnivalesque atmosphere summed up by the cry "Ei ja nai ka" ("Why not?") in Japan in 1867 and 1868 in the days leading to the Meiji Restoration. It examines the effects of the political and social upheaval of the time, and culminate...

In this 1979 condensed-for-film recut of Hayao Miyazaki's 1978 anime series, a young boy named Conan goes on a grand adventure. Conan lives in a world that is mostly oceans; the major land masses having been destroyed by the weapons of the great disa...

A story of childhood life during wartime Japan. Takeshi, the intelligent son of a fisherman, is the schoolyard bully. When his cousin comes to stay with his family to avoid bombing raids, Takeshi at first treats him well, then begins bullying him too...

A young teen's father dies, and he is sent to an orphanage. He's teased because he stutters almost runs away, until a beautiful, androgynous boy, Yasuo, convinces him to join the choir....

Detective Kogoro Akechi is faced with a peculiar murder case involving forgeries of classic pornographic artworks....

In 1907, a group of men climb an unconquered peak in the last unmapped region of Japan....

Minako (TANAKA Yuko), begins her day running up and down the hills of her hometown delivering milk door to door. When that's done, she heads to her day job as a supermarket cashier. Minako is 50 and single. In one of the houses to which she delivers ...

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "Seven Samurai" (1954)....