"Stray Dog"
1949
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

A first-rate thriller in which Kurosawa has acknowledged his debt to Georges Simenon. Toshiro Mifune plays rookie Detective Murakami, who loses his gun only to discover that it has fallen into the hands of a killer. Terrified of losing his job, his search takes him into the Tokyo underworld, full of postwar shortages, "divinely hellish under Kurosawa's odd-angled lensing and staccato editing…Stray Dog is a Dostoevskian saga of guilt, and expiation, by association" (Pacific Film Archive). Japanese with English subtitles. 122 minutes.