When we first meet Kingo Gondo, a Japanese businessman played by Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film “High and Low,” he’s just completed the deal of his life, finally securing enough stock to ...

In the new Spike Lee film “Highest 2 Lowest,” Denzel Washington stars as music mogul David King. He lives at the top of the world — which, of course, is a New York City zip code — in a glittering ...

Credits: Directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Tsutomu Yamazaki. Rating/Runtime: Not rated. 143 minutes. Streaming on various services.

Despite the German Expressionist influence on the genre, the roots of film noir are undoubtedly American — a morally introspective and nationally cynical mirror to the traditional western. As a whole, ...