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Critics reviews

HIGH AND LOW

Akira Kurosawa Japan, 1963
The dimensions of story and image converge in the film's exceptional application of the cartographic principle. Almost every moment of High and Low turns upon continuity of vision, or the question of what can be seen from where.
March 3, 2015
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High And Low rarely gets mentioned when cinephiles talk about the medium's most masterful formal achievements. Even among Akira Kurosawa's films, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood, and Ran are more likely to be cited for purely visual mastery, if only because they're all more superficially dynamic. But few movies have ever been as subtly, methodically composed as High And Low, in which every shot reflects, to some degree, the dichotomy presented by its title.
February 20, 2014
In High and Low, the honor of the samurai code evolves into something far more complex and rich. Kurosawa finds this essence by filling the widescreen frame with as many bodies as possible, allowing the social subtext to rise above and become a new form of verbalized swordsmanship.
July 27, 2011
Though the scenes inside Mifune's hilltop estate sound like filmed theater, Kurosawa makes them breathtakingly cinematic, filling each long take with a lot of dynamic movement across his CinemaScope frame. Once the action opens up, Kurosawa rolls up his sleeves and analyzes each piece of evidence that comes the detectives' way... Miraculously, High And Low turns the mundane follow-through of police work into the stuff of white-knuckle suspense.
July 29, 2008
From McBain's tight little paperback thriller Kurosawa fashioned one of his most expansive and symphonic works, a film that immerses itself in the minutiae of the modern metropolis—pay phones, streetcars, garbage-disposal centers—while at the same time often approaching pure visual abstraction.
July 21, 2008
Relegating this film to the back lots of genre would be a mistake. Mifune's towering performance and Kurosawa's dynamic, bold camera make High and Low worthy of critical favour. The penultimate film Kurosawa and Mifune would make together, it stands as a testament to their partnership, and also a statement of a formidable ability, both in front of and behind the camera.
February 8, 2005
Though some prefer the original Japanese title (Heaven and Hell),High and Low maintains the altitudinal relation (the villain is a denizen of the city's lower depths, most vividly depicted in the nighttown of "Dope Alley") while suggesting the brows of its bisected narrative: The first hour is a taut moral drama; the second, a nail-biting tale of detection.
July 24, 2002
in Drunken Angel, an alcoholic slum doctor and a wounded hoodlum; in High and Low, an industrialist and the criminal who attempted to kidnap his son. Both are dense, Dostoyevskian exercises, more breathtaking than the director's later, grandiose historical pageants. High and Low is his most accomplished contemporary film.
January 16, 2002
The film never wavers under the assured direction of Akira Kurosawa. It is, all at once: a procedural crime story, a social commentary on the casualties of industrialization, the redemption of a man's soul.
January 1, 1999
Building on the whirlingly Wellesian The Bad Sleep Well—Kurosawa's previous modern-dress meditation on narrative fragmentation and moral decay—High and Low makes good on its title by grooving on twitchy, tawdry rock n' roll, painstakingly ladling sewage on Schubert's "Trout" quintet, and intensifying the climax of its murder investigation with a rinky-tink radio broadcast of "It's Now or Never"... It's a thriller flush with needle-spiking tensions and bullet-train exhilarations.
October 12, 1998
I would nominate this authoritative 1962 adaptation of Ed McBain's novel The King's Ransom as Akira Kurosawa's best nonperiod picture, though Ikiru and Rhapsody in August are tough competitors... The title refers to the topographical layout of the action as well as class divisions, and Kurosawa's script and masterful mise en scene do a lot with both.
February 1, 1994
The Boston Phoenix
The excitement lies not in epic battle scenes but in the way the director deliberately leads you through each stage of the crime and the police investigation. If the picture is as taut as a spring (and one that never quite uncoils), this is Kurosawa's way of acknowledging that reckless grand passion... isn't possible in the world of today. The pleasure of High and Low is in feeling your mind work as every action leads to another action, each in turn opening up new complexities.
July 22, 1986