Masaki Kobayashi: A Retrospective

The SamuraiSamurai movies as they became known were heavily influenced by Westerns from the 30s and 40s. Given a huge boost in popularity both in Japan and across the world by Akira Kurosawa's earlier jidaigeki films like Rashomon and Seven Samurai, they drew upon the conventions of the Westerns of John Ford, John Wayne, and…

Family Without a Dinner Table

#4 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi’s films. I really had no idea what I was getting into with Masaki Kobayashi's final film. Extremely difficult to track down at all, I had to settle with a copy at Rarefilmm that seems to have been filmed on a VHS recorder from a television broadcast. The quality of…

The Fossil

#13 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi’s films. Originally made for Japanese television, The Fossil feels like Kobayashi leaving behind his anger at systems and confronting mortality, as does his main character. In a surprisingly close telling of a very similar tale to Kurosawa's Ikiru, Kobayashi confronts a life of workaholism that suddenly and definitively will…

Masaki Kobayashi: The Definitive Ranking

I decided to discover the complete works of Masaki Kobayashi for two reasons: I loved Samurai Rebellion, and I had purchased The Human Condition a couple of years ago (after having seen it years back) and was simply not getting around to the nine-and-a-half hour long feature film, especially when I’m filling most evenings with…

Inn of Evil

#15 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Kobayashi continues his combination of social commentary with the remnants of his early melodramatic and dramatic work in Inn of Evil, a tale of a group of criminals at the lowest end of corruption in a corrupt society needing to deal with conflict from every side. I…