“Ranks with Kurosawa's greatest works! The filmmaking conveys an extraordinary sense of urgency, a fierce need to capture the complexities of human behavior while everything is still fresh and volatile... You can feel Kurosawa’s excitement at the prospect of reinventing the conventions of his national cinema.”
– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times (January 3, 2010)
Click here to read entire review

"Shows Tokyo roasting in the aftermath of war, with morals and motives alike melting under the sun, and evil ripening like fruit...
Some of the chases are as fast and pure
as anything from silent cinema."
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker (January 11, 2010)
Click here to read entire review


"Of [Kurosawa's] postwar efforts, Stray Dog is far and away the best—a police procedural that echoes American noir while injecting a strain of what can only be termed Japanese humility. Kurosawa, like the Italians picking through the rubble in The Bicycle Thief, is held rapt by the details of a ruined society rebuilding itself."
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
Click here to read entire review

“THE PERFECT SERIES OPENER; relatively unknown, it confirms why Kurosawa was, for so long, top dog. Its example should inspire the new decade... Here is the source of Coppola’s deep, photographic interest in everything, still tied to basic human emotion; of the white-suited villain in DePalma’s The Untouchables; and the teeming, steaming city in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.”
– Armond White, New York Press
Click here to read entire review

“A fitting opening of Film Forum's restrospective! Displays flamboyantly textured mise-en-scene, audaciously complex montage sequences, and unrivaled extremes of environment and landscape.”
– Michael Joshua Rowin, The L Magazine

“AN EXTRAORDINARY GENRE WORK!
Emotionally full-contact, stylish, and profound in its details.”
– Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice

“Mifune is magnetic as a Tokyo cop obsessed with recovering his gun, but the real star is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor. The movie is an impassioned outcry against social dissolution — Kurosawa sees both Mifune and the thief who goes on a crime spree with the cop’s pilfered Colt as products of a brutal postwar environment.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

“Above all a film of atmosphere... By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds — fluttering fans, the mopping of brows,
a cop hitting the back of a witness’ electric fan to make it oscillate between them — Kurosawa evokes a world in perpetual motion.”
– Chris Fujiwara

Click here for full KUROSAWA Festival Schedule

(1949) KUROSAWA NOIR: While a rubble-strewn Tokyo swelters through a torrid heat wave, awkward young white-suited detective Toshiro Mifune finds to his shame that his pistol has been stolen — and then that it’s been used in a murder. Thus begins his obsessive, guilt-ridden search, highlighted by a nearly ten-minute dialogue-less sequence shot by hidden camera in the toughest black market section of the city. (The post-production dubbing, with twelve of the latest pop songs layered in, was so difficult that Kurosawa’s soundman was reduced to tears.) No bleeding hearts here: when seasoned mentor Takashi Shimura points out that the killer, a returned vet, went bad when all his possessions were stolen, Mifune heatedly replies that the same thing happened to him — and then he became a cop. No surprise then that, as the chase progresses toward a final confrontation — electrifyingly backgrounded by a young girl’s stop-start practicing of a Mozart piece — Mifune and the unseen killer begin to seem more and more alike. A confessed admirer of Georges Simenon, Kurosawa adapted his own unpublished novel for this, his first detective film (the second is High and Low: see Jan. 22) and the real beginning of the genre in Japan. Approx. 122 minutes
A JANUS FILMS RELEASE