© Janus Films

NEW YORK – TOKYO is pleased to announce the 4-week, 29-film festival celebrating the centennial of director Akira Kurosawa at Film Forum. This special celebration will go on from Wednesday, January 6 through Thursday, February 4. The festival opens with a 9-day run (Jan. 6-14) of his early Film Noir tour de force Stray Dog, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cop searching for his stolen service revolver through a sweltering post-war Tokyo. The film echoes American noir and is considered the beginning of detective films in Japan. We are happy to support the Kurosawa festival and are giving away 10 pairs of tickets for Stray Dog. Please fill out the form after the jump for your chance to win tickets for this film. If you are into film, you must make it to see this film master’s work. More information and full schedule can be found here. Check after the jump:

“Ranks with Kurosawa’s greatest works! The filmmaking conveys an extraordinary sense of urgency, a fierce need to capture the complexities of human behavior while everything is still fresh and volatile… You can feel Kurosawa’s excitement at the prospect of reinventing the conventions of his national cinema.”
– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times (January 3, 2010)

“Of [Kurosawa's] postwar efforts, Stray Dog is far and away the best—a police procedural that echoes American noir while injecting a strain of what can only be termed Japanese humility. Kurosawa, like the Italians picking through the rubble in The Bicycle Thief, is held rapt by the details of a ruined society rebuilding itself.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

“Mifune is magnetic as a Tokyo cop obsessed with recovering his gun, but the real star is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor. The movie is an impassioned outcry against social dissolution — Kurosawa sees both Mifune and the thief who goes on a crime spree with the cop’s pilfered Colt as products of a brutal postwar environment.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

© Janus Films

© Janus Films

© Janus Films