Akira Kurosawa 4
Seven Samurai
by Jeremy Clarke. Akira Kurosawa’s three-and-a-half-hour epic Seven Samurai (1954) remains to this day a landmark movie in Japanese and world cinema. It is currently streaming on BFI Player as part of the five month long Japan 2020 programme alongside 21 other Kurosawa films together with a much wider selection of Japanese movies including some […]
Books: On Kurosawa
By Jasper Sharp. The robustly-designed and impressively laid-out new tome On Kurosawa: A Tribute to the Master Director by Peter Tasker inevitably prompts the same questions I raised a year ago in my review of Paul Anderer’s Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Does the world really need another book on this director, and what exactly is it about […]
Mifune: The Last Samurai
by Jeremy Clarke. Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) is director Akira Kurosawa’s iconic star of his samurai movies Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. He’s the subject of three time Oscar-nominated documentary film maker Steven Okazaki’s useful documentary Mifune: The Last Samurai (2015). As narrator Keanu Reeves says in voice-over, without Mifune there would have been no Magnificent […]
Kurosawa’s Ran
Andrew Osmond revisits a restored classic. In 1985, Akira Kurosawa released his last epic film, Ran (meaning “Chaos”). The Japanese-French co-production was inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear but it transposed the tragedy to the lost Japan of many Kurosawa classics, of violent swordplay, doomed heroes and harsh morality. Such films – Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne […]