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Ugetsu (1953)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Kenji Mizoguchi sends a potter seeking his fortune across a lake in the middle of a civil war. The mist around the boat makes the crossing feel as though it could end in a different world. Start here for the ease with which his camera moves from the devastation of war into a ghost story.
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Floating Clouds (1955)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
A typist and a married man fall in love in wartime French Indochina. Back in Japan, the distance between his promises and what he will actually do keeps growing. Mikio Naruse gives Hideko Takamine room to show why someone might recognize the pattern and still go back.
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Harakiri (1962)
8.6/10on IMDb
Released
A masterless samurai asks a powerful clan for permission to die in its courtyard. Masaki Kobayashi makes that formal request the beginning of a long reckoning. Watch how differently the courtyard feels once the visitor has told his side of the story.
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Gate of Hell (1953)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Teinosuke Kinugasa puts brilliant color to work in a tale of a warrior who becomes obsessed with a married lady-in-waiting. The court costumes are worth watching for on their own. Their elegance makes the warrior's pursuit feel more sinister as it pushes through the rituals of court life.
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Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
Two children are sold into slavery after being separated from their mother. Mizoguchi makes a story about living by an exiled father's example out of their separation. Come to it after Ugetsu for a slower tragedy that puts an even more difficult decision in a daughter's hands.
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The Life of Oharu (1952)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
A woman who once served at the imperial court looks back at the life that brought her to poverty. Kinuyo Tanaka carries Mizoguchi's long view of Oharu with very small changes in manner as her standing changes. It is a good companion to Forever a Woman, where Tanaka gets to tell a woman's story from behind the camera.
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When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
The stairs in the title are the ones Keiko climbs to go to work as a Ginza bar hostess. Naruse shows her feet on the steps as if it were any other night. That repetition gets at what leaving the job would cost her, and what she gives up each time she puts off the decision.
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Forever a Woman (1955)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
A poet learns that she has breast cancer and keeps writing through treatment. Kinuyo Tanaka directs, with Yumeji Tsukioka giving the poet an impatience and hunger that hold their own against the hospital routine. It makes an absorbing change from the historical suffering Tanaka often played herself.
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Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
Hideko Takamine plays a teacher who gets to know twelve children in a rural community on Shodoshima. Keisuke Kinoshita stays with them long enough to see what the war does to the futures they once imagined. The songs the teacher shares with them make the earlier classroom scenes all the more affecting.
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The Burmese Harp (1956)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
In Kon Ichikawa's war film, the first thing that travels between enemies is a song. Follow a Japanese soldier in Burma as he takes a different path from the men he served with. It is a patient, mournful choice for a viewer more interested in what someone owes the dead than in military strategy.
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Fires on the Plain (1959)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
Try this after The Burmese Harp to see how differently Ichikawa could approach defeat. A sick Japanese soldier in the Philippines wanders an increasingly desperate landscape. The film gets its force from one man's humiliating search for food and shelter as whatever protection his uniform once offered disappears.
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The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959)
8.5/10on IMDb
Released
The first part of Kobayashi's trilogy puts its idealist in charge of workers subjected to forced labor in a Japanese-run mine. Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) thinks he can make conditions more humane. The drama lies in watching what happens when his ideas reach people with the power to stop him.
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The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity (1959)
8.5/10on IMDb
Released
The second Human Condition film puts Kaji in uniform and on the receiving end of military discipline. Watch how a recruit's treatment changes as rank and seniority enter the room. The training scenes show what a demand for unquestioning obedience means to the people at the bottom.
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The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961)
8.8/10on IMDb
Released
Kaji tries to get home through Manchuria after the Japanese defeat in the last part of The Human Condition. Its wandering pace suits a man whose choices have narrowed to the next stretch of road. It repays a viewer who has followed the earlier films' arguments about duty all the way to this point.
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The Ballad of Narayama (1958)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
A village expects people who reach seventy to be left on a mountain. Kinoshita presents the custom on vividly colored sets that look like a stage, with the story's rhythms drawn from kabuki. Look for how this version gives a stark subject a deliberate, almost ceremonial pace.
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Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Also known as A Story from Chikamatsu, Mizoguchi's drama follows a scroll maker's wife and apprentice in Kyoto after false accusations force them to flee. It is a fine way into his quieter approach to suspense: a pause or the space between two people in Kazuo Miyagawa's compositions can tell you what they cannot say aloud.
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Night Drum (1958)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Tadashi Imai adapts a Chikamatsu puppet play into a tragedy about a samurai and his wife. A rumor about her infidelity becomes a matter of family honor, with consequences that show how little room the social code leaves either of them. Pair it with Harakiri for another director’s view of what that code could demand.
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Repast (1951)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Setsuko Hara and Mikio Naruse make an unhappy marriage feel like something that accumulates a day at a time. Stay with the domestic routine at the beginning. Watching Hara go through familiar tasks gives a better sense of what her character wants to escape than a big confrontation could.
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Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
A baby left at a couple's door starts a commotion that reaches the lodgers upstairs. Heinosuke Gosho sets the film under the smokestacks of working-class Tokyo. Watch for how they appear to change in number as the angle changes. That small joke about perspective suits a movie that can find two reasonable sides to an exasperating day.
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Lightning (1952)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
Hideko Takamine's Kiyoko is a tour guide whose family wants a say in her choice of husband. Naruse lets questions about money and an inheritance complicate those ordinary family conversations. Choose it for a woman trying to work out how much independence a paycheck can buy.
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Clothes of Deception (1951)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Machiko Kyo plays a Kyoto geisha who uses what she knows about business to look after a sister with a very different job and ideas about marriage. Kozaburo Yoshimura makes their relationship worth following for the distinction between the skills that earn these women a living and the choices those skills can buy them.
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