Actor · 1923–1981

Isao Kimura

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell

Yoshiyuki Kuroda · 1974

The sixth and final film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, released in Japan in April 1974, follows ronin assassin Ogami Ittō and his infant son Daigoro as they flee the Yagyū clan across snowbound mountains. Directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda and written by Kazuo Koike, it escalates the series’ violence and austerity to near-abstract extremes — culminating in a battle where Ittō defeats over a hundred men using the baby cart as a weaponised sled. It does not resolve the manga’s storyline, nor does it seek psychological depth; instead, it commits to physical logic, formal repetition, and unrelenting forward motion.

13:00

High and Low

Akira Kurosawa · 1963

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low adapts Evan Hunter’s King’s Ransom into a stark, vertically structured drama about a businessman’s moral crisis after a kidnapping goes wrong. Shot in black and white by Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito, it divides cleanly between Gondō’s elevated Yokohama home and the city’s slums, using space, lens, and editing to interrogate inequality, policing, and accountability. With Toshirō Mifune and Tsutomu Yamazaki in career-defining roles, it remains a benchmark of socially engaged genre filmmaking.

13:00

Stray Dog

Akira Kurosawa · 1949

A young Tokyo detective loses his service pistol in a crowded trolley in the summer of 1949. With the help of a veteran colleague, he traces it through the city’s black markets, yakuza networks, and dance halls — not to deliver vengeance, but to understand how postwar desperation reshapes morality, authority, and the very idea of justice.

13:00

Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa · 1954

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film follows a poor farming village that recruits seven masterless samurai, offering only food and shelter, to defend it against a bandit gang planning to return once the barley ripens. Shot by Asakazu Nakai across a punishing production that ran well over schedule, scored by Fumio Hayasaka and led by Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, the film ran to 207 minutes and cost 210 million yen, a large outlay for the period, before shaping the template that countless action and heist films have followed since.