Akira Kurosawa 2
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 […]