 Movies from Japan
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Death Note (2006)
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| Light Yagami finds the "Death Note," a notebook with the power to kill, and decides to create a Utopia by killing the world's criminals, and soon the world's greatest detective, "L," is hired to find the perpetrator. An all out battle between the greatest minds on earth begins, with the winner controlling the world.
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Death Note - The last name (2006)
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| Shinigami own notebooks called 'Death Notes' which are used as killing devices. Whoever's name they write down in a death note will die within 40 seconds. Shinigami Ryuku accidentally dropped his Death Note in the human world where it's found by honor high school student Light. With the death note actually having directions in it for its use, Light discovers he now has the power to discreetly kill people, and with this new power he plans to change the world in his ideal world by killing off criminals. Eventually the governments of the countries around the world notice the unusual amounts of deaths of their criminals, and figure out someone is behind them, but they have no way of discovering it themselves. That's when they hire L, a master detective, to find out who is behind the murders.
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Kagemusha (1980)
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| In his late, color masterpiece Kagemusha, Kurosawa returned to the samurai film and to a primary theme of his career-the play between illusion and reality. Sumptuously reconstructing the splendor of feudal Japan and the pageantry of war, Kurosawa creates a historical epic that is also a meditation on the nature of power.
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Princess Mononoke (1997)
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| A prince is infected with an incurable disease by a possessed boar/god. He is to die unless he can find a cure to rid the curse from his body. It seems that his only hope is to travel to the far east. When he arrives to get help from the deer god, he finds himself in the middle of a battle between the animal inhabitants of the forest and an iron mining town that is exploiting and killing the forest. Leading the forest animals in the battle is a human raised by wolves, Princess Mononoke.
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Seven Samurai (1954)
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One of the most beloved movie epics of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.
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Spirited Away (2001)
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| Chihiro and her family are on their way to their new house in the suburbs when her father decides to take a shortcut along a lonely-looking dirt road. After getting out of the car and walking along a path for a while, they discover an open-air restaurant filled with food but with no workers or customers present. Mom and Dad don't hesitate to sit down and dig in, but Chihiro senses danger and refuses. As night falls, she is terrified to see the area fill with faceless spirits, but when she runs to find her parents, she discovers that they have been turned into pigs. She is found by a mysterious boy named Haku, who promises to help her. He gets her a job working in a nearby building, which turns out to be a bathhouse for the thousands of Japan's gods and spirits. Though the work is hard and the people strange, she does as well as she can. Her parents, however, are still waiting in the hotel's stockyard, and Chihiro must find a way to break the spell on them before they end up as the main course of some guest's dinner.
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