Friday through Sunday

The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

Scandal-seeking reporters act as a chorus at the wedding reception for bespectacled pencil-pushing executive secretary Mifune and limping boss’s daughter Kiyoko Kagawa. As cops wait in the wings, a cake shaped like an office building wheels in, a single rose marking the site of a notorious suicide—or was it murder?

This film has interesting parallels to Hamlet, with Mifune seeking to avenge his father’s murder—and with a corrupt government housing agency playing the role of the Danish court.

“Evokes the pungent atmosphere of Warners 1930s gangster flicks.” Time Out New York.

Plays Friday through Sunday (February 29-March 1) at 7:30; plus 2:30 matinee Sat/Sun.

High and Low (1963)

Shoe company exec Mifune is in the midst of a mortgage-everything takeover battle when the phone rings with a ransom demand for his son .

Adapted from Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel King’s Ransom, this is the ultimate kidnap movie, with Kurosawa at the peak of his filmmaking powers: with the cops led by SteveMcQueen-cool Tatsuya Nakadai; the de rigeur money transfer aboard the Shinkansen (bullet train); and a jailhouse interview punctuated by the heaviest steel door closing in film history.

“Undoubtedly the most complex detective film of all … Contains so many nuances of narrative, photographic technique, and acting, that it demands seeing far more than once.” William K. Everson.

Plays Friday through Sunday (February 29-March 1) at 4:55 and 9:55.