Rashômon (1950) tells four tales on the Criterion Collection

On November 6, 2012, The Criterion Collection released Rashomon on Blu-ray. Akira Kurosawa directed the film which starred Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, and Masayuki Mori.

‘Rashomon’ Movie Synopsis

Rashomon begins as heavy rain pours monotonously out of a dark sky. Under Kyoto’s once-glorious front gate, a poor woodcutter and a faithful priest gather around a feeble campfire to share their take on a mysterious murder with a wet commoner. Out in a lush bamboo forest, a valiant samurai died as the hands of the notorious bandit, Tajomaru. He then sexually assaulted the dead man’s wife. Before court and through a series of flashbacks, four strikingly different points-of-view inextricably interweave with half-truths, cover-ups, and the supernatural, to further blur the lines between memory and fact. Who is the evil-doer behind this intricate tale? In the end, only your personal perspective and bias can decide.

Read the full summary, and listen to our film review.

Special Features

• New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary by Japanese-film historian Donald Richie
• Interview with director Robert Altman about Rashomon
• Excerpts from The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentary on Rashomon’s cinematographer
• A Testimony as an Image, a sixty-eight-minute documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew
• Archival audio interview with actor Takashi Shimura
• Original and rerelease trailers
• Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
• PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film historian Stephen Prince; an excerpt from director Akira Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography; and reprints of Rashomon’s two source stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Rashomon” and “In a Grove”

Also available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.