Text by flavorpill NY

Ahead of Akira Kurosawa‘s centenary on March 23, Film Forum more or less runs through the auteur’s consummate filmography (on queue: Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) in six action-packed weeks. Two masterpieces also bracket this domo-arigato series: Stray Dog, an early, naturalistic film about a detective and the search for his missing gun in postwar Tokyo, and Ran, Kurosawa’s superlative, late-career translation of King Lear to the feudal East and its tragic, color-specific daimyos. The former stars Toshiro Mifune and the latter Tatsuya Nakadai, two Japanese icons who reappear throughout a canon that incorporates everything from pulp to Noh theatre, Shakespearean tragedy to the almighty Bushido code.

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