After the Rain

Snowflowers: Seeds of Hope

A touching true story which portrays a doctor who selflessly dedicated his personal fortune to spreading the smallpox vaccination for saving people's lives.

Letter from the Mountain

Husband and wife Michiko and Takao move from their urban existence in Tokyo to the isolated, rural farming village where Takao grew up.

Ran

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.

Best Wishes for Tomorrow

A Japanese Class B war criminal sets out to take full responsibility for the execution of American Airmen.

Dersu Uzala

A military explorer meets and befriends a Goldi man in Russia’s unmapped forests. A deep and abiding bond evolves between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the glacial Siberian woods.

Falling Camellia

During the Edo period, a gifted swordsman was exiled from his clan when he questioned the misconduct of his leader. Years after, his dying wife wish was for him to go back to his clan.

Dreams

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.

The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai

In the turbulent last days of the Edo period, Kawai Tsugunosuke, a Japanese samurai serving the Makino clan of Nagaoka, dreamt of independence from the restraints of vassalship. Despite his progressive views and his desire for his estate to remain neutral during the Boshin Civil War, he was bound by loyalty and duty to the clan and was compelled to choose sides.

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.

A Samurai Chronicle

A retired samurai must redeem himself for a crime that he committed earlier in his life.

Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create: 'Kagemusha'

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "Kagemusha" (1980).

The Professor and His Beloved Equation

This is the story between single mother housekeeper and mathematics professor,who has a brain damage.

Island of Loves

This film depicts the life of the 19th-century Portuguese writer Wenceslau De Moraes by means of nine ancient ballads from China. The writer married a Chinese woman after he left his wife and family to go live in Macao. Later, he moved to Japan where he fell in love with a Japanese woman, staying in Japan for the rest of his life. Mixed in with the career and loves of Moraes is the history of Portugal at home and in its colonies.

Song of the Horse

Akira Kurosawa’s only television work—a lyrical documentary that follows a thoroughbred from birth and training to the Japan Derby—framed by a grandfather’s narration to his grandson about the fading bond between people and horses.

Vietnam

Captures the optimistic attitude and entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of the Vietnamese people, who remain positive despite ever-present reminders of the horrors of the Vietnam War.

Lolita

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Four best friends (Tibby, Lena, Carmen & Bridget) who buy a mysterious pair of pants that fits each of them, despite their differing sizes, and makes whoever wears them feel fabulous. When faced with the prospect of spending their first summer apart, the pals decide they'll swap the pants so that each girl in turn can enjoy the magic.

My Brother Is an Only Child

Accio and Manrico are siblings from a working-class family in 1960s Italy: older Manrico is handsome, charismatic, and loved by all, while younger Accio is sulky, hot-headed, and treats life as a battleground — much to his parents' chagrin. After the former is drawn into left-wing politics, Accio joins the fascists out of spite, but his flimsy beliefs are put to test when he falls for Manrico's like-minded girlfriend.

Ring 0

Taking place thirty years before the events of Ringu, Ringu 0 provides the shocking background story of how the girl on the video became a deadly, vengeful spirit.

Sideways

Two middle-aged men embark on a spiritual journey through Californian wine country. One is an unpublished novelist suffering from depression, and the other is only days away from walking down the aisle.

The Phantom of the Opera

A young soprano becomes the obsession of a disfigured and murderous musical genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House.

Patriot Games

When CIA Analyst Jack Ryan interferes with an IRA assassination, a renegade faction targets Jack and his family as revenge.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Winston Smith is a government employee whose job involves the rewriting of history in a manner that casts his fictional country's leaders in a charitable light. His trysts with Julia provide his only measure of enjoyment, but lawmakers frown on the relationship -- and in this closely monitored society, there is no escape from Big Brother.

Thank You for Smoking

Nick Naylor is a charismatic spin-doctor for Big Tobacco who'll fight to protect America's right to smoke -- even if it kills him -- while still remaining a role model for his 12-year old son. When he incurs the wrath of a senator bent on snuffing out cigarettes, Nick's powers of "filtering the truth" will be put to the test.

The Mistress of Spices

Tilo is an Indian shopkeeper in America with an ability to see the future and a magical connection to powerful spices, which she uses to help her customers satisfy their various needs and desires. One day she falls in love with an American man. But the spices forbid it.

Hannibal

After having successfully eluded the authorities for years, Hannibal peacefully lives in Italy in disguise as an art scholar. Trouble strikes again when he's discovered leaving a deserving few dead in the process. He returns to America to make contact with now disgraced Agent Clarice Starling, who is suffering the wrath of a malicious FBI rival as well as the media.

The Mighty

Kevin, an intelligent guy helps out Maxwell to improve his reading skills. In return, Kevin wants Maxwell to take him out places since he is not authorized to go out. Being the social outcasts of the town, Kevin and Maxwell come to realize that they are similar to each other and accept that they are "freaks" and nothing will stop them.

Leave No Trace

A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. But when a small mistake tips them off to authorities, they are sent on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own.

Candyman

The Candyman, a murderous soul with a hook for a hand, is accidentally summoned to reality by a skeptic grad student researching the monster's myth.