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“... masterless samurai. The time is 1860, pretty late for samurai in general, and the film is Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). The Criterion Collection issued a DVD version of this film in 1999, along with its sequel Sanjuro: yojimbo means ‘bodyguard’, and Sanjuro is the Mifune character’s name. Doesn’t seem long ago, and the prints looked ...”

“... I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it,’ Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road), and it’s true: this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and emotional force that it becomes, for its audiences, as potent as their own most deeply personal memories ...”

“... it will doubtless be accompanied by A.K., Chris Marker’s documentary on its veteran director Akira Kurosawa. The plum documentary on the toils of film-making remains, however, Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a record of the Amazonian shoot of Fitzcarraldo (in an attempt to bring Caruso to the Indians, a possessed white man decides to haul a river ...”

“... It is indeed a look given. One person who may have noticed it was a young Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s tenth film as director, Stray Dog (1949), is a Simenon-like thriller about a young detective, Murukami (Toshiro Mifune), whose gun goes missing. With some help from the older and wiser Sato ...”

“... I can live it.’ The first phrase is from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, the second from Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, the third from Susan Sontag’s notebooks. We could find many more examples. Why do we process this difficult thought so easily? Is that part of what it’s about?Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a brilliant treatment ...”

“... the distancing, all-American fantasy. To start with, A Fistful of Dollars is an elegant remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). It was shot in Spain, with a large contingent of Italian actors. There are Germans playing Mexicans and Americans, and the only American here is Clint Eastwood, a Westerner to be sure, born in San Francisco and a graduate ...”

“... to a Japanese writer, Ishiguro, and to his mentors, the Japanese filmmakers; not the flamboyant Kurosawa, but the equally gifted Ozu. Ishiguro’s first two novels were profoundly cinematic in their technique: the subtle shifts of light – the medium out of which, and into which, cinema is created – were interwoven deeply, in these novels, with their ...”

“... acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author). He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from ...”

“... politeness and never set eyes on again. She decides that repeated viewings of her favourite film, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, will provide him with appropriate ‘role models’, and a strong incentive to learn Japanese. This is hardcore encyclopedism. ‘What makes the novel singular,’ Konstantinou remarks, ‘is its idiosyncratic dedication ...”