eighteen kurosawa Films

I wish I could say that I loved Kurosawa’s last eight or nine films as much as those that came before, but following the end of his collaboration with Toshirô Mifune, I believe much of the passion that I associate with his work is missing. I may be projecting my adoration of Mifune onto Kurosawa, but a certain homoerotic tension is central to my reading of their longtime collaboration. Of the grand spectacles he concocted late in life, I prefer Kagemusha (1980) to Ran (1985), his adaptation of King Lear. Perhaps the best of his late films is Hachi-gatsu no kyôshikyoku (Rhapsody in August, 1991.) I have seen all of Akira...