Stray Dog (Japan, 1949)

Murukami, a young homicide detective, has his pocket picked on a bus and loses his pistol. Frantic and ashamed, he dashes about trying to recover the weapon without success until taken under the wing of an older and wiser detective, Sato. Together they must track down the culprit before more people show up dead, killed by Murakami's own gun.

Stray Dog is a great film-noir police drama by Akira Kurosawa with Toshiro Mifune in the lead as a desperate rookie cop. It features an highly entertaining plot where the tension mounts fast and the story grows more and more complex. A classic, well-directed and compelling detective story about a missing gun. Beautiful.

Genre: Drama/Crime/Film-noir

Late Spring (Japan, 1949)

Noriko is 27 years old and is still living with her father Somiya, a widower. Noriko just recovered from an illness she developed in the war, and now the important question pops up: when will Noriko start thinking about marriage? Everybody who is important in her life tries to talk her into it: her father, her aunt, a girlfriend. But Noriko doesn't want to get married, she seems extremely happy with her life. She wants to stay with her father to take care of him. After all, she knows best of his manners and peculiarities.

Late Spring has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema", and has widely been referred to as director Yasujiro Ozu's best work. With a fantastic screenplay, it's a well-told story about ordinary lives in Japan's immediate post-war era.

Another essential classic.

Genre: Drama