Main Cast: Sam Shepard, Paul Scofield, James Coburn, Clint Eastwood, Shinobu Hashimoto
Release Year: 2001
Country: JP/UK/US
Run Time: 115 minutes
Plot
Akira Kurosawa was arguably the most important Japanese filmmaker who ever lived; he was certainly among the most revered and most influential. His award-winning feature Rashomon was one of the first major international successes in Japanese filmmaking, convincing many western cineastes for the first time that Japan had a national cinema worth investigating, and his subsequent body of work -- including Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, and Ran -- is emotionally rich and esthetically compelling in a way few filmmakers can match. Kurosawa is a documentary which explores the personal and professional lives of this giant of world cinema, including interviews with his friends, family, contemporaries, actors, fellow filmmakers, and noted cinema historians -- and in archival clips, Kurosawa himself. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
To take in the magnificent career of a filmmaker as prolific and protean as Akira Kurosawa in less than two hours may seem a daunting task, but writer-director Adam Low has succeeded admirably in offering a moving and amazingly detailed portrait of both the man and the artist. The clips are well chosen (even if some films, like High and Low and The Bad Sleep Well, get short shrift), the interviews informative (including some archival clips of the subject and his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune), and there are two superb touches: Paul Scofield reading from Kurosawa's writings and a running visual motif of a downtown Tokyo building with a giant screen on its side running various scenes from older Kurosawa films. Though it would have been nice to have some of Kurosawa's American disciples, such as George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, on hand, the late James Coburn (who appeared in The Magnificent Seven, the remake of The Seven Samurai) and Clint Eastwood (whose A Fistful of Dollars was a remake of Yojimbo) do offer the Yanks' perspective. The comments of Kurosawa's daughter and son, actor Tatsuya Nakadai and director Kon Ichikawa are well-placed, Donald Richie (whose writings about Kurosawa helped to cement his international reputation) offers historical perspective, and then there is an unexpected bonus: Machiko Kyo, the female lead of Rashomon, Kurosawa's breakthrough film, looking smashing as she and several members of that film's production team revisit one of the film's rural locations and reminisce. It's an inspired idea like that which lifts this film above the standard cut-and-paste "biographies" that litter cable/satellite TV stations these days. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
