Hitchcock, The Early Years – A Retrospective

I've gone through all of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography, and I can easily say that the man made a lot of movies over a long period of time. From the mid 20s to the late 70s, he has directing credits on fifty-three feature films that still exist. That's a lot of ground to cover, and it's far…

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Yojimbo

#5 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. Akira Kurosawa's most purely fun film, Yojimbo is the work of a master simply out to give his audience a good time. With a light and playful tone that gives way to an earned feeling of peril, Kurosawa's seemingly frothy ronin tale ends up one of the…

The Bad Sleep Well

#7 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. By the end of this film, I could have sworn that The Bad Sleep Well was made by Masaki Kobayashi not Akira Kurosawa. The film ends up too cynical about contemporary Japanese corporate culture without the balance of tender humanity that I know Kurosawa for. It's also…

The Hidden Fortress

#24 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. Famously one of the main points of inspiration that George Lucas used to write the first Star Wars film, The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa chasing financial success with a big, brash action adventure after his last film, an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky play, didn't exactly…

The Lower Depths

#18 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. Adapted from the play of the same name by Russian author Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths is an effort on Kurosawa's part to be experimental to a small degree. Trying to replicate the theatrical experience in film form, it's a far more engaging and cinematic effort to…