Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
There are few names in cinema more intimately associated with the medium than that of Akira Kurosawa. A painter by trade, he rose through the Japanese film industry to the rank of director in the middle of the Second World War where he had to balance between commercial, artistic, and imperial interests. He learned his trade… Continue reading Akira Kurosawa – A Retrospective
Akira Kurosawa was one of the titans of cinema. Across his 30 feature films, he created some of the great populist entertainments, adapted foreign literature expertly into the Japanese idiom, and captured some of the best performances on film. Without him, the world of cinema would be quite different. He effectively created the modern action… Continue reading Akira Kurosawa: The Definitive Ranking
#27 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. It's an interesting irony that the last film of Kurosawa's long career is titled Not Yet. He was a man who didn't see an end for his career just yet, but an accident left him lame in his final months, preventing him from working on another film… Continue reading Madadayo
#26 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. The third of Kurosawa's three works that dealt directly with the atomic bombing of Japan and its aftermath, Rhapsody in August is a flawed but worthwhile penultimate film from one of the masters of the craft. There's a deep well of emotion hiding in the film for… Continue reading Rhapsody in August
#15 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. This might be the most interesting autobiographical films I've seen, and that is in no small part because it's not strictly autobiographical. A collection of dreams, obviously, that Kurosawa supposedly has had throughout his life, touching on real places and people he knew, it seems to show… Continue reading Dreams
David Vining, Author 