Criterion’s mammoth AK100: 25 Films of Akira Kurosawa box set will hit retail shelves on Tuesday (8th of December 2009). But, who should buy it? Despite the title, this is More...
First of all, apologies for the recent silence from my part, but life (read: “work”) has been hectic. Last month, I constantly kept hoping that I would find the time More...
Lionsgate has announced the upcoming release of Ran on Region A Blu-ray, scheduled for February 16th 2010. The film is among the first three works put out as part of More...
Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan explains the basics of occupation era censorship, gives an interesting interpretation of Ozu, but offers quite little in terms of More...
The publication date for Lars-Martin Sorensen’s new book Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa was supposed to be More...
Kurosawa’s old production designer, art director and sometime costume designer Yoshiro Muraki has died of heart failure, Tokyograph and Kyodo News report. The 85 year old Muraki passed away on More...
China Daily has published an interview with Emi Wada, where the renowned costume designer discusses her work, including anecdotes from her Oscar winning work for Kurosawa’s Ran. Wada worked on More...
This month’s Film Club offering is the 1957 film The Lower Depths, based on the Maxim Gorky play of the same name. Kurosawa began work on The Lower Depths soon More...
Kendra Preston Leonard’s Shakespeare, Madness and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations (Scarecrow Press, August 2009) is first and foremost a book from the field of Shakespeare studies. However, as More...
First of all, let me say that I’m terribly sorry about the week-long downtime. The visitor numbers have been growing lately, putting more strain on the servers, and very suddenly More...
Ran, the film of the month for our Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club, holds a special place in Kurosawa’s oeuvre. It is the last of his great epics, a film More...
The 66th Venice International Film Festival, which will be held from 2 September to 12 September 2009, is going to pay tribute to Akira Kurosawa with a special panel discussion. More...
My second copy of D.P. Martinez’s new Kurosawa book Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema arrived today, this time from Amazon.co.uk, where I originally placed my pre-order back More...
Kurosawa – Webster’s Timeline History 1910-2007 is a book published in 2008 as part of a “Webster’s Timeline History” series, which includes several dozen other books on various subjects. Very More...
When it comes to physical dimensions, D.P. Martinez’s new Kurosawa book Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema is about the size of the Donald Richie edited Rashomon. This More...
I haven’t posted links to other people’s Kurosawa related blog posts for a long time, but this one was just too good to pass. I mean, how else to approach Rashomon than with… detailed flowcharts? I especially like the Final Theory which, obviously, explains everything.
I’m not sure if I understand what is going on here, but Variety reports that Toho has won its lawsuit against Cosmo Coordinate, which tried to sell cheap editions of More...
Its August 18th release date may still be a couple of weeks into the future, but the first reviews of Criterion’s new Blu-ray Kagemusha release have begun to appear. The More...
Word has come my way that The 8th Samurai (see earlier coverage here and here) has won the BEST of FEST award at the LA Shorts Fest. This is significant, More...
Welcome to the AK Online Film Club edition #16. There are at least two things to get excited about this month. One, of course, is the film itself, The Bad More...
A couple of book related news updates. First of all, Dolores Martinez’s Remaking Kurosawa has now been out for a month or so in the US, but I have yet More...
July’s edition of Akira Kurosawa Film Club features Record of a Living Being, which in the English speaking world has also been released as I Live in Fear. Filmed over More...
According to Blu-ray.com, Optimum Home Entertainment will release Ran on Blu-ray on September 28. The UK release may be region-locked to Blu-ray region B. A discussion topic at Blu-ray.com forums More...
Do you ever have the feeling that Seven Samurai is a little bit everywhere these days? Well, with last year’s Japanese Pachinko remake, the Weinsteins reimagination project, Irvine Welsh’s soccer More...
If you have been a reader for some time, you may remember last year’s Japanese remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, which got some fairly mixed reviews: Daily Yomimuri called More...
Welcome to the 14th edition of our very own social experiment dubbed the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club! For us, fourteen is an excellent number indeed, for it signifies the More...
Would you be interested in seeing some twenty thousand pages of Kurosawa’s screenplays, photos, storyboards, drawings, notes, newspaper clippings, personal scribblings and other materials? If yes, head to the Akira More...
NipponCinema.com has the first teaser trailer for Hiroyuki Nakano’s forthcoming film Tajomaru. As reported earlier, the film follows the adventures of the titular rogue from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In More...
Well, the first on the list is being remade by the author of the second, set in the world of the last mentioned. Yes, you read it right. Irvine Welsh More...
Criterion has announced an August 18 release for a blu-ray edition of Kagemusha. In terms of extras, the blu-ray edition is an exact copy of Criterion’s double DVD release. More information about the release can be found on Criterion’s product page.
Welcome to the 13th edition of the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club! Yes, a year has already passed since we began with Rashomon, and what a wonderful year it has More...
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott has recorded a three-and-a-half-minute piece on Ran under his “Critics’ Picks” series. The video can be seen at YouTube. Although just a very More...
Throne of Blood is the April movie for our online film club. It is also the 12th movie on our list, completing the first year of discussion! As Coco already More...
Remember The 8th Samurai, a short film about an actor who is fired from the set of a samurai film directed by a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to More...
According to the Hokkaido Shimbun Press, a horse that formerly belonged to Kurosawa passed away on March 19. The horse, called Yumego, was 33 years old. According to the article, the American born horse appeared in Kagemusha and Ran, and after Kurosawa’s death was presented to the town of Ozora where Dreams was partly filmed.
Some forum talk has indicated that Criterion may have lost their rights to Ran. If true, this means that the DVD release is now out of print, and the planned More...
I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray. Yesterday, March 23rd 2009, marked 99 years since the birth of Akira Kurosawa. To celebrate, I decided to More...
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has announced its 2010 lineup, which will also be the festival’s 75th season of Shakespeare productions. Among the more typical Shakespeare productions prepared for next year’s More...
So, Criterion’s new Dodesukaden came out earlier this week, and the reviews have been coming in accordingly. Below, you will find a handful of (semi-)professional reviews of the DVD release. More...
According to IMDb, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have recorded “emotional video messages” for the Cherry Blossom Gala in Los Angeles, which celebrates Kurosawa’s 99th birthday and the opening of the new Akira Kurosawa film school in Anaheim.
I’m a bit behind with this (not the only such thing (but I’ll try to catch up once I get back home later this week)), but it seems that the More...
Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema is the title of a forthcoming Akira Kurosawa book written by Dr Dolores Martinez from the University of London School of Oriental More...
The month has changed again it seems, and so the focus of the Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club shifts to the next film on the list. Marked for March is More...
It’s official: Criterion’s first Blu-ray Kurosawa will be Ran. The single disc release will be available on 12 May 2009, and based on what I see on the product page, More...
Following last week’s server move, there was one (hopefully) final (but huge) problem with the forums, which I have now solved. You can read more about it here. Please accept my apologies, and let me know if you encounter any further problems.
If you can read this, it means that the server move is now done, and thanks to the magic of intertubes, you are now staring at the same old AK.info More...
Edit: The move is now over. As you may have noticed, the server has been down again for most of the day. So, I am finally going to do what More...
From first-time writer/director Justin Ambrosino comes The 8th Samurai, a 28 minute comedy about Nanshu, a struggling actor who finally seems to have made a break in the film industry More...
Guardian reports that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s visitor centre at Stratford-upon-Avon is preparing a Hall of Fame dedicated to performers, directors and artists who were inspired by Shakespeare and championed More...
You may have noticed that the month has changed once again, and as always this means that the focus of our Akira Kurosawa Film Club shifts onto a new More...
On December 11th, 2008 the Oxford English Dictionary went through its latest update, this one concentrating on the words within the range from ran to reamy. Among the new entries More...
According to a press release made available today, Anaheim University is to open what they call the Akira Kurosawa School of Film. The online programme is to launch on March More...
Newsrama.com reports that today’s episode of George Lucas’s animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars borrows heavily from Seven Samurai. The episode, titled “Defenders of Peace”, was written by Bill Canterbury. Edit: As I note in a comment below, the episode in the end had very little to do with Seven Samurai.
Whether this is connected to the rumoured Jim Sheridan remake of Ikiru, I do not know, but it has come to my attention that Stone Village Pictures, together with Dreamworks More...
Hiroyuki Nakano, who according to reports masterminded a Pachinko version of Seven Samurai last summer, is approaching the Kurosawa territory again with his next movie, Tajomaru. According to Tokyograph, the More...
So far, the only high definition Kurosawa release is the French HD-DVD version of Ran, released in 2007. This is, however, about to change in February with a range of More...
The Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club starts 2009 with the mouth watering offering of Seven Samurai, perhaps Kurosawa’s most well known work. The 1954 film, about a group of samurai More...
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