One of the many great things about running Akira Kurosawa NID is that I am time to time contacted by interesting people with connections to Kurosawa. Yesterday, I received a More...
Kabei: Our Mother, which is based on Teruyo Nogami’s wartime memoirs, has received 12 nominations for the Japan Academy Awards, including Picture of the Year, Screenplay of the Year and More...
Criterion has decided to give out its Christmas gifts early this year, with the company announcing the release of Dodesukaden on March 17th next year. After a few less than More...
As you may remember, a while back I asked you to vote for the Akira Kurosawa Film Club’s 2009 schedule. And although there were only three actual votes, it was More...
The first of the AK100 events seems to already have started (actually not: see update below), with the exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. Here is a short description More...
The stomach on the left belongs to the protagonist of this month’s edition of the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club. Yes, it is November and therefore time for the 7th More...
Variety reports that the often mentioned Hollywood remake of High and Low is once again moving forward, with Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, most recently Charlie More...
This year’s Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award has been given to Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov and Chen Kaige at the Tokyo Film Festival. The recipients were chosen by a panel that included costume designer and Akira Kurosawa’s daughter Kazuko Kurosawa. Variety has more about the recipients’ reactions.
UK’s Optimum Releasing is putting out a new Region 2 edition of Rashomon, coming out on October 13. Amazon.co.uk takes pre-orders (£11.98), while the film is also available from Optimum’s More...
A new Japanese DVD release of After the Rain appears to be on its way, with Amazon.co.jp indicating an October 24 release. In case you have no idea what I More...
What is perhaps the best of a sorry lot, Kino International’s Dersu Uzala DVD (Region 1) will be re-released on December 9 as part of a “Great Directors” box set. More...
October’s here, and I would therefore like to invite you all to the sixth edition of our monthly Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club. This month, we will be facing what More...
Some further tiny news bits: An adaptation of Samurai 7, based on Seven Samurai, will be staged at the Shinjuku Koma Stadium in Tokyo in November this year. (source) Meanwhile, More...
To round up this week’s Akira Kurosawa related news, here’s two lighter news items: Kin Sugai, who over the years appeared in five Kurosawa films with minor roles (in High More...
Continuing with the AK100 related news (see my previous post), it has also been announced that Kurosawa Production together with Japan’s Lotus, America’s Lexicon Film Entertainment and Harbor Light Entertainment, More...
The AK100 project now seems to have an international website called AK100 World Tour. I must say that I am not fully certain how I personally feel about it. In More...
Listen to the World blog reports that the Japanese musician Yoshiki is lined up for the AK100 (Kurosawa’s 100th birthday) celebrations in 2010. The article does not say much (perhaps More...
Geeks of Doom has published an interview with screenwriter John Fusco, and although the bulk of the article centres on The Forbidden Kingdom, they also talk about the Seven Samurai More...
September stands for High and Low, at least when it comes to the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club. You should by now be familiar with the system, but in case More...
With Blu-ray having won the “high definition format war” last spring, and Criterion now finally starting to put out their Blu-ray releases, there has been discussion whether it makes any More...
The US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has completed a digital restoration project to clean up Rashomon, and will be premiering the new print at the Samuel Goldwyn More...
The copyright saga about Kurosawa’s pre-1952 movies seems to have come to an end yesterday with a Japanese Intellectual Property High Court ruling that establishes the Tokyo District Court’s September More...
It is the first of August, which in Film Club terms means the beginning for the discussion of Kurosawa’s 1949 movie Stray Dog (”Nora inu”). While Stray Dog is considered More...
It seems that, somewhat out of the blue, a new Seven Samurai remake has been released in Japan. The film was directed by Hiroyuki Nakano (Samurai Fiction), and stars an More...
Criterion’s double-disc re-release of High and Low should now be available for purchase. Amazon.com stocks the item for $27.99. The release has received a very positive response from DVD critics. More...
In an interview for Malaysia’s Star Online, John Woo who is currently promoting his latest film, the $80 million martial arts extravaganza Red Cliff, mentioned that at some point in More...
DVD Beaver, who we know for excellent technical reviews of DVD releases, has given Criterion’s new High and Low disc a look, and updated their High and Low page. It More...
DVD Town has published what I think is the first review to surface for Criterion’s new double disc edition of High and Low, to be released on the 22nd of More...
It’s been somewhat quiet in the news front recently, so here’s something to quench your most burning thirst for Akira Kurosawa news: last week, Wired listed Seven Samurai 20XX among More...
So, July is here (has actually already been for a couple of days) and it is therefore time to turn our Film Club’s attention to Yojimbo. Consequently, and as always, More...
New York’s WNYC radio has recorded an interview with Tatsuya Nakadai, who is currently in the city for a Nakadai retrospective that celebrates his career. The 20-minute interview briefly touches More...
New York Sun sat down with Teruyo Nogami, who is currently in New York for the Tatsuya Nakadai retrospective. The rather short, but nevertheless interesting, exchange can be read here. More...
After discussing Rashomon and Drunken Angel in the past two months, the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club will move on to Yojimbo in July. Perhaps Kurosawa’s most popular film, Yojimbo More...
In the past couple of days there have been a few smaller Kurosawa related news bits that I have decided to put together into one news post. So, here we More...
Well, June is here and so it is time for us to turn the attention of the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club to Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi), the 1948 movie More...
Daily Yomimuri Online has a review of the new Hidden Fortress remake The Last Princess. Unlike the Mark Schilling review that I linked to earlier today, the Daily Yomimuri piece, More...
The Japan Times’s Mark Schilling, who has written extensively on modern Japanese film, gave us the first verdict of last year’s remake of Sanjuro, and he is at it again More...
Although we have yet but scratched the surface of Rashomon with our first ever Film Club discussion series, it is already time to start thinking about the next films so More...
Just a heads-up: some legitimate posts have recently been caught by the forum spam filter and been marked as spam, therefore not making the posts appear at all. Mainly long More...
Toho has reportedly sued Cosmo for $130,000, this time due to the company manufacturing three classic non-Kurosawa films that Toho holds the copyright for. Earlier this year, Toho hit Cosmo More...
Japan Zone and Tokyo Graph have short articles on the recent University of Southern California screening of The Last Princess, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress that opens in More...
I think that May 1st has by now started everywhere on the globe, and has in fact already finished in many places, so let me now announce the first session More...
Criterion continues their process of updating some of their oldest Kurosawa releases. Next in line is High and Low, which will get a new treatment on a double disc set More...
Before its official May 10 opening in Japan, The Last Princess (the new remake of The Hidden Fortress) will have its US premiere in Los Angeles. The screening will take More...
The “Thompson on Hollywood” blog on Variety reports about the latest developments with The Weinstein Co.’s Asian Film Fund. While most of the article is about The Forbidden Kingdom, the More...
As decided earlier, AkiraKurosawa.info’s Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club will kick off on May 1st 2008 with Rashomon. Everyone is welcome to participate. The Film Club was set up to More...
Nikkei News has an article on The Last Princess, which as most readers should by now know is a remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress to be released in Japan More...
According to Variety, Toho has thrown a $1.2 million lawsuit at Cosmo Coordinate that manufactured and sold budget versions of Kurosawa’s DVDs until the court ruling last year degreed that More...
The second teaser trailer for Shinji Higuchi’s remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, renamed The Last Princess, has been made available on the updated official website. The trailer is also More...
Screenwriter John Fusco has talked briefly to SciFi Wire about the Seven Samurai remake that he is currently working on under the Weinstein Co. He is quoted in the article More...
The Japanese actress Akemi Negishi died of cancer in Kawasaki on March 11 at the age of 73. Negishi first came into international prominence through Josef von Strinberg’s 1953 More...
Some time ago I mentioned the “AK100 Project” initiative, which is set to begin later this year in order to celebrate and remember Kurosawa through “exhibitions of Kurosawa’s work, newly More...
Famed Japanese rocker Tomoyasu Hotei, RnB singer Kreva and bassist Seiji Kameda (of the band Tokyo Jihen) have been announced as working on the theme song for Shinji Higuchi’s remake More...
Those of you in Tokyo at the end of the month may not want to miss an event that the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan is organizing on the 31st More...
A documentary on the soundtrack work of Toru Takemitsu has appeared on YouTube. You can watch the first part here, and follow the “Related videos” links to continue with parts More...
While trying to find more information about the recent press announcement regarding unfinished Kurosawa footage, I stumbled upon a Japan Today article from December 29 last year. The article in More...
The Screen Daily correspondent Jason Gray writes in his blog about a Kurosawa Production press conference, according to which footage from an unfinished 1983 documentary by Kurosawa, as well as More...
Criterion’s February 2008 newsletter has a “top ten Criterions” list from the Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch. Four of the ten films on his list are Kurosawa titles, with Seven More...
According to the official website, the DVD for Yoshimitsu Morita’s remake of Sanjuro will be out on 23 May, 2008. The release will have two different versions, a basic DVD More...
Although I was pretty happy with the design that I came up with about a year ago, in the long run it turned out to be extremely impractical and, let’s More...
Kurosawa continues to inspire people in many interesting ways. One of the most fascinating examples of this that I have seen in the recent past I stumbled upon this morning More...
Yoji Yamada’s Kabei - Our Mother, which is based on the war time memoirs of Teruyo Nogami, got its first foreign screening at the Berling Film Festival on Wednesday. The More...
Legendary Japanese film maker Kon Ichikawa died yesterday of pneumonia in Tokyo. He was 92. The passing away of Ichikawa, who was perhaps best known abroad for The Burmese Harp More...
Shinji Higuchi’s remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress now has a full trailer, available on the official website, as well as at YouTube. The trailer seems to put into question More...
Published last December, Akira Kurosawa: Interviews is the latest volume in the University Press of Mississippi film book series Conversations with Filmmakers. It is also the first English language book More...
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s In a Bamboo Grove has been dramatised for the radio by the BBC. The short story, of course, worked as the primary source text for Kurosawa’s Rashomon. I More...
As Master Thief pointed out a few days ago in the comments to Amazon’s new Kurosawa offerings, the Australian Madman Entertainment’s Eastern Eye series put out a host of new More...
The Amazon.com exclusive Criterion Collection Director Series: Akira Kurosawa that I wrote about recently turns out to consist of Criterion’s new version of Yojimbo, Seven Samurai and Sanjuro (as well More...
January 7 quietly saw the All Regions DVD release of Rashomon by a company called Triad Productions. Based on the item description on the Amazon website, according to which the More...
Reviews of the Postwar Kurosawa set have started to fly in. As usual, DVD Talk gives us a good general overview of the box set, while the DVD Beaver review More...
The Hidden Fortress remake now has a teaser trailer that can be viewed on the official website. It of course doesn’t reveal all that much about the finer details, but More...
The Indian film company Palador Pictures has announced the release of an Akira Kurosawa DVD Box Set comprising five of the director’s best known films. The box set is exclusively More...
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