review for Kurosawa on AllMovie

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.