20 Most Personally Beautiful Japanese Films

By: alex peterson

No country has more respect from me than Japan, even though the US (perhaps necessarily) is the most influential nation in my movie-mind. I can’t speak with authority about the Japanese character or condition enough to properly explain why their cinema is the best, overall, of any national cinema I’ve taken in, but here are the ones which consistently bring me overflows of emotions.

so many are left off, and this list is CLEARLY stacked towards the all-time big names – Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa and Naruse. lesser-knowns like Ichikawa, Okamoto, Imamura and especially Gosha don’t appear as much as I have no doubt that my inability to see Japanese films in Japan has skewed me. nevertheless:

01

Sansho the Bailiff

Kenji Mizoguchi
02

An Autumn Afternoon

Yasujirô Ozu
03

The Life of Oharu

Kenji Mizoguchi
04

Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa
05

Woman in the Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara
06

I Was Born, But...

Yasujirô Ozu
07

Ikiru

Akira Kurosawa
08

Ugetsu

Kenji Mizoguchi
09

Black Rain

Shôhei Imamura
10

The Sword of Doom

Kihachi Okamoto
11

Drunken Angel

Akira Kurosawa
12

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums

Kenji Mizoguchi
13

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Mikio Naruse
14

Fires on the Plain

Kon Ichikawa
15

Yojimbo

Akira Kurosawa
16

Sonatine

Takeshi Kitano
17

Street of Shame

Kenji Mizoguchi
18

A Story of Floating Weeds

Yasujirô Ozu
19

Sword of the Beast

Hideo Gosha
20

Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi

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Bruna Carvalho

22Sep11

well, i think Koizora is one of the best's too!!

japanophile

27Nov10

Where's Afterlife?

alex peterson

16Nov09

yes, if you mean i prefer the family-oriented stuff to films by Suzuki and Fukusaku, which are kind of fun to watch drunk. i don't much like kiyoshi kurosawa or hitoshi matsumoto. i think gosha truly straddles the line - his splattery samurai films and even more violent yakuza stuff occasionally breaks through as incredibly humanist. "goyokin" and especially "tenchu" are heartbreaking at parts. there isn't enough great japanese stuff on here - early oshima and imamura. anyway, always held back by being able to see only what has been translated, a classicist, yeah.