The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026)

[jbeall]

Well, if this review by the New Yorker's Justin Chang didn't have me excited, the trailer with a Janus films logo certainly did the trick.

[Mr Sausage]

I saw it at Fantasia and it’s a pretty good movie, a kind of mystery anthology set in a momentous historical moment, methodically paced, and pitting rationalism against the spectre of mysticism and the supernatural. It mixes a range of tones within Kurosawa’s usual distanced, dispassionate style. I liked it a lot more than the other big Japanese detective movie I saw this year, but otherwise think it’s a solid but not exceptional Kurosawa film.

[hearthesilence]

I was actually unaware of this film until they announced the opening. I still regret missing much of Kurosawa's recent work, so I made a point to see this in theaters before it was too late. It's not as stylistically daring as his best-known (and arguably best) work, but I thought this was excellent and possibly the best narrative film I'll see all summer.

The plot is built mostly around a string of mysteries with only brief depictions of combat (reportedly just like its source novel, though I've yet to read it), but it's still very much a war film, and like all of the great war films I've seen from Japan, it left me the impression that a once-defeated nation was more likely to interrogate the culture of war (or military culture) in ways others would not do, particularly how violence is justified, whether individually or on a mass scale. The ending alone leaves a lasting impression for that reason.