Yoshida’s fame and popularity is mostly due to his exceptional trio of radical New Wave films: Eros + Massacre, Heroic Purgatory and Coup d’Etat. Kinoshita legacy did not hold strong unfortunately but his body of work was no doubt key in the development of the country’s cinema. Eros + Massacre in particular became one of the landmark films of the burgeoning genre, featuring the powerful story of the life of anarchist Sakae Osugi. The film was released in Japan in 1951, but in the United States only in 1963. In the closing days of the war, he learned of the destruction of his childhood home in Hiroshima, which led him to make his 1952 docudrama Children of Hiroshima. Kiki Evans is a film and TV show lover who writes about all things cinema. Yukie is a housewife whose leftist lover is accused of espionage during World War II which directly correlates with the story of Hotsumi Ozaki. His 2001 film Spirited Away – about a young girl exploring a bizarre fantasy realm to find a cure for her parents’ sudden metamorphoses into pigs – broke Titanic’s box-office record in Japan and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003. Suicide Squad: 5 Things It Got Right (& 5 It Got Wrong), Top 15 Hollywood Directors And Their Signature Styles, 10 Godfather Memes That We Can't Refuse To Laugh At, Guardians Of The Galaxy: Nebula's 10 Best Quotes, Top 10 Adapted Screenplay Oscar Winners, Ranked According To IMDb, 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Making Of Back To The Future. It was a critical and commercial failure in Japan but earned a nomination for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. Still, his recent films like Tokyo Park and The Backwater show Aoyama’s brilliant directorial vision and his continued contributions to the medium. Seven Samurai has twice been remade as The Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars. From his start until the war, Inagaki made over 30 films, cementing him as one of the most prolific early auteurs and innovators of the craft. At his start in the film business, Shindo worked as an assistant to the great Kenji Mizoguchi and continued in the industry as a scriptwriter for the next two decades, writing for some of the greatest directors of the time. The film was received by the audience much better than by the critics. The film, which clocks in at three hours and forty minutes, follows three victims of a violent hijacking as their life and mental states deteriorate around them. It is about a village that hires seven ronin (also known as the samurai without masters) to protect the farmers from the bandits that will return to steal the harvest once it has been gathered. Shindo’s films also became famous for their more forward approach to sexuality which was especially shocking in his early career. Kiki is working towards her dream of becoming a filmmaker one day and believes that cinema is one of the humankind's greatest inventions. Directed by Akira Kurosawa The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. One of these was his early wartime drama Army starring acting great Chishu Ryu which gained fame due to its controversial depiction of grieving mothers of soldiers, an image that the war department did not like. Originally, this was supposed to be an adaptation of one of Yamamoto's novels, but then the script was altered with the success of Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro became a sequel to that movie. No Regrets for Our Youth is a 1946 film based on the 1933 Takigawa incident. Japan’s cinema has produced three canonical masters – Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa – and other formidable directors such as Mikio Naruse, and Masaki Kobayashi. It was his first movie in 45 years where he was the only one working on the script, and he claimed to have repeatedly had the dreams that the film is based on. His protagonists are more invested in peacemaking and mediation than confrontation. Kitano leads a sort of double life: on one hand he is a director acclaimed in the West; on the other, he is ‘Beat’ Takeshi, an acerbic stand-up comic, actor, and ubiquitous TV host in Japan. Unlike most Japanese filmmakers, Fukasaku actually got his big break from working in Hollywood on a few projects, first directing the forgotten science fiction B-Movie The Green Slime and then directing a portion of the big budget war movie Tora! RELATED: 10 Best Movies Steven Spielberg Produced, But Didn't Direct (According To IMDb). He has continued to put out consistent films, even if they have fallen out of the public eye somewhat. Some of his most notable films include The Naked Island, a film about humans’ struggle against nature, and two Japanese horror classics, Onibaba and Kuroneko. It's a pity Kurosawa never directed any live-action anime remakes, because he could have been the one to make them actually great. In the 1960s, he emerged as one of the standout talents of the Japanese New Wave. The peculiar thing about the movie is that the initial version of the film was 265 minutes long, but around 100 minutes were cut by the studio after it was poorly received at the test screenings. The film explores such themes as art, death, spirituality, childhood, human mistakes, and world disasters. After getting his start making some documentary films, Koreeda’s first major film Maborosi attracted critical attention with comparisons being made to greats like Ozu and Mizoguchi. RELATED: Martin Scorsese's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes. He was the only Japanese citizen who suffered the deathly penalty for treason during World War II because he assisted the Soviet spy Richard Sorge. The story tells us about a geisha who falls in love with a samurai that appears in her village while on the run after having killed a man. Ozu is best known for Tokyo Story, a poignant film about inter-generational tensions and alienation that is widely considered a masterpiece. Another critically acclaimed film of his career was Twenty-Four Eyes, the story of a young schoolteacher and her career of teaching during the rise of the nationalist movement in the early 20th century. In fact, the film's failure even led to the director attempting suicide in 1971. Nevertheless, The Bad Sleep Well is regarded as one of Kurosawa's best works and one of the three of his noir movies. A brutal visionary of 1970s Japanese cinema, Kinji Fukasaku built his reputation on the shock and violence of his early yakuza films and only got more bold from there. The go-to source for comic book and superhero movie fans. Unlike the yakuza pictures that came before it, Fukasaku’s approach was raw and violent, shot with a documentary style of cinematography. Koreeda is still an evolving filmmaker, his films coming out continuously and his style still changing. Koreeda’s career continued and his films persisted in their slow, but meaningful style. Here’s a guide to 10 of the most accessible. In addition to his four films, Matsumoto has contributed much more to the world of the Japanese arts. He did not make his directorial debut until 1951 with the autobiographical film Story of a Beloved Wife and the next year he caught the attention of the film war with his riveting drama Children of Hiroshima which was very controversial as it was one of the first Japanese films to approach the subject of the atomic bomb.