The film that opened the world's eyes to the pleasures of Japanese cinema, Rashomon is famous for telling the story of a brutal encounter in the woods outside Kyoto - a samurai and his wife are stopped by a bandit, the wife raped, the husband killed - from the perspectives of all the participants and witnesses. Standing out among a stellar cast is Mifune's bug-bitten bandit, his antics a foil for surprising, even confusing, depths. Whose story is "true"? Rashomon both celebrates and annihilates point-of-view - call it late Cubism or early postmodernism, set in a twelfth-century postapocalyptic landscape. What is amazing is that this most storytelling of films is a kind of pure cinema: between Kurosawa's instinctual direction and Kazuo Miyagawa's virtuoso camera, there is almost no need for words. The camera writes the account of a gesture, enacts the rush of a forest breeze: truth expressed 24-frames-per-second, a little different each time.

Showtime: 4:30pm, 6:20pm, 8:10pm