Japanese cinema: 21 films from the masters

Weekly collection in the app for the week of August 7, 2026.

Half of world cinema's grammar was written in Japan: Kurosawa's weather and motion, Ozu's still rooms and family seasons, Mizoguchi's ghosts gliding through long takes. Then come the inheritors, Kore-eda's makeshift families, Hamaguchi's conversations, and the anime masters Kon and Otomo.

This collection of 21 films ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of August 7, 2026, featuring Seven Samurai. It pairs each master's peaks where the two-per-director cap allows and makes room for the disreputable geniuses: Suzuki's hitman pop art, Kitano's deadpan gangsters, Imamura's pigs.

The collection

1. Seven Samurai (1954) Kurosawa Featured A poor village hires seven masterless samurai to defend it from bandits; three and a half hours of recruitment, preparation and battle that invented the team-up movie. Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Yoshio Inaba
2. Rashomon (1950) Kurosawa A samurai is dead in a forest; the bandit, the wife, a woodcutter and the dead man himself all tell contradictory versions. The film that made unreliable narration a structure. Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Takashi Shimura
3. Tokyo Story (1953) Ozu An elderly couple travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children, who are too busy for them; almost nothing happens, and it is regularly voted one of the greatest films ever made. Cast: Chishū Ryū, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara
4. Late Spring (1949) Ozu A devoted daughter lives happily with her widowed father until everyone insists she must marry; Ozu's gentlest, saddest study of letting go. Cast: Chishū Ryū, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka
5. Ugetsu (1953) Mizoguchi In civil-war Japan, two potters chase profit and glory across the lines, and one is seduced by a ghost; a ghost story told with heartbreaking calm. Cast: Machiko Kyō, Mitsuko Mito, Kinuyo Tanaka
6. Sansho the Bailiff (1954) Mizoguchi A governor's family is torn apart and sold, the children into slavery under a brutal bailiff; a medieval tale of endurance shaped into pure sorrow. Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyōko Kagawa
7. Harakiri (1962) Kobayashi A ronin requests permission to commit ritual suicide in a clan's courtyard, then tells the story that explains why; a revenge tragedy that dismantles the samurai code piece by piece. Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita
8. Woman in the Dunes (1964) Teshigahara An entomologist misses his bus and is trapped by villagers in a sandpit with a widow, shoveling sand to survive; an erotic, existential parable that feels like no other film. Cast: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida, Kōji Mitsui
9. Floating Clouds (1955) Naruse A woman and a married man who had an affair in wartime Indochina keep finding and failing each other in ruined postwar Tokyo; Naruse's bleak masterpiece of attachment. Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Mariko Okada
10. The Burmese Harp (1956) Ichikawa After Japan's surrender, a soldier-musician stays behind in Burma, disguised as a monk, to bury the countless dead his army left; a war film about mourning rather than battle. Cast: Rentaro Mikuni, Shōji Yasui, Jun Hamamura
11. In the Realm of the Senses (1976) Oshima The true 1936 case of Sada Abe: an affair between a maid and her employer spirals into total erotic obsession; explicit, notorious, and dead serious about where desire ends. Cast: Eiko Matsuda, Tatsuya Fuji, Aoi Nakajima
12. Spirited Away (2001) Miyazaki A ten-year-old girl must work in a bathhouse for gods and spirits to free her parents, who have been turned into pigs; Miyazaki's Oscar winner and the studio's most beloved film. Cast: Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki
13. Shoplifters (2018) Kore-eda A Tokyo family that survives on petty theft takes in a neglected little girl, and the film slowly reveals what actually binds them; a Palme d'Or winner about chosen family. Cast: Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka
14. Drive My Car (2021) Hamaguchi A widowed theater actor directing Uncle Vanya is assigned a quiet young chauffeur, and their long drives unspool grief, guilt and his wife's secrets; three hours that fly. Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada
15. Onibaba (1964) Shindô In war-torn medieval Japan, a mother and daughter-in-law survive by killing stray samurai and selling their armor, until a demon mask enters the reeds; primal horror. Cast: Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Satō
16. Branded to Kill (1967) Suzuki Japan's No. 3 hitman, aroused by the smell of boiling rice, botches a job and becomes the target of the mysterious No. 1; a yakuza thriller as deranged pop art. It got its director fired. Cast: Joe Shishido, Kōji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa
17. Sonatine (1993) Kitano A weary Tokyo yakuza sent to Okinawa on a suspicious errand waits out a gang war on a beach, playing children's games between sudden bursts of violence; deadpan and fatalistic. Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe
18. Perfect Blue (1997) Kon A pop idol quits music for acting and is stalked, as her sense of self splinters between roles, fans and a double; the anime psycho-thriller Aronofsky openly borrowed from. Cast: Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto, Shiho Niiyama
19. Akira (1988) Otomo In Neo-Tokyo, a biker gang member develops uncontrollable psychic powers while his friend tries to stop him and the state that made him; the film that broke anime worldwide. Cast: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama
20. Pigs and Battleships (1961) Imamura Around a U.S. naval base in Yokosuka, small-time hoods run a pig-farming racket; Imamura's raucous, unsentimental portrait of Japan scavenging in America's shadow. Cast: Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Masao Mishima
21. Tampopo (1985) Itami A truck driver helps a widow turn her failing noodle shop into the perfect ramen joint, in a comedy that keeps wandering off into sketches about food, sex and death; a self-declared ramen western. Cast: Tsutomu Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe

Keep your place

Working through a canon takes months, and that is what I Like Movies is for: keep the collection on your watchlist, mark films as you watch them, and rate them so your recommendations learn your taste. New themed collections arrive in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

Should I start with Kurosawa or Ozu?

Kurosawa if you want momentum: Seven Samurai and Rashomon carry you. Ozu if you want to be quietly rearranged: Tokyo Story and Late Spring. There is no wrong door; they are opposite masters of the same golden decade.

Why is Harakiri rated so highly?

Kobayashi's 1962 film is regularly among the top-rated samurai films on TMDB and Letterboxd alike: a formal revenge tragedy that dismantles the samurai code scene by scene until the genre's myth collapses with it.

The week before: The greatest documentaries: 21 essential films. The week after: True crime, eighties style: 21 films. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.