The great Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi (1916-1996), best known for his passionate, socially committed films in the post-World War II era, and actor Tatsuya Nakadai (b. 1932) worked together on ...

The image of a character committing seppuku or harakiri – a form of ritual suicide by self-disembowelment – in a Japanese jidaigeki (period drama) film is always shocking, but never surprising. This ...

Masaki Kobayashi (February 14, 1916–October 4, 1996) was a Japanese director. Among his films is Kwaidan (1965), a collection of four ghost stories drawn from the book by Lafcadio Hearn, each of which ...

World War II and its aftermath loom large in the endlessly rich expanse of 20th century Japanese cinema. But no major Japanese director was as visibly affected by this defining trauma as Masaki ...

Lovers of golden-age Japanese cinema have long owed a debt to the Criterion Collection, which sets the benchmark for restoring and releasing such movies on home video. The company's efforts have been ...

Nothing says that an art piece managed to pass the test of time like the fact that, even more than 60 years later, that piece is still talked about and regularly appears in various lists of the most ...

“All of my pictures . . . are concerned with resisting entrenched power. . . . I suppose I’ve always challenged authority. This has been true of my own life, including my life in the military." ...