Rashomon: Akira Kurosawa’s truly daring film is still electrifying
20 greatest Venice film festival Golden Lion winners – ranked!
May 2023
Guy Lodge's streaming and DVDs
Streaming: the best winners of Cannes’ Palme d’Or
Twenty-one films will vie for the top spot at the 76th Cannes film festival, which starts next week, hoping to join the roll call of past classics, from Taxi Driver and M*A*S*H to Parasite
November 2022
Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Living review – Bill Nighy tackles life and death in exquisitely sad drama
A gentle and poignant Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru about a man dealing with a terminal diagnosis
January 2022
Macbeth movies have been foul and fair – Joel Coen’s is a stunner
The Tragedy of Macbeth follows in the footsteps of Orson Welles’s bold 1948 film, which showed how imagination can turn Shakespeare’s text into more than just a costume epic
December 2021
Emi Wada obituary
Costume designer who won an Oscar for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, and created John Gielgud’s cloak in Prospero’s Books
October 2021
Seven Samurai review – an epic primal myth that pulsates through cinema
Akira Kurosawa’s tale of ascetic mercenaries brought together for a single job inspired endless imitations, but the original has lost none of its magic
May 2020
The classic film I've never seen
I've never seen … The Magnificent Seven
In one sense this is a glorified rip-off that guts Kurosawa’s thoughtful original, repackages it with a stylish title and fills it with guns … but it’s fun!
Another big shift in direction for Simpson, with anime visuals, glam rock, disco and grunge ornamenting never-more-country lyrics: it’s extraordinary
February 2019
Ranked
The best Shakespeare films – ranked!
Kenneth Branagh graduates from player to playwright this week for All is True, in which he plays an ailing Bard. But which big-screen Shakey is the greatest?
November 2018
Seven Samurai tops critics' poll of best foreign-language films
Akira Kurosawa epic beats Bicycle Thieves to top of BBC’s 100-strong list that includes just four female-directed films
March 2018
My favourite film decade
From The Naked City to Double Indemnity – why the 1940s is my favourite film decade
War changed everything, destroying whole film industries and heralding a new era of realism, grit and shoots on location
October 2016
Film blog
Ingmar Bergman's Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka: intriguing, sexy and intense
Previously unknown Ingmar Bergman script to be filmed by former antagonist
April 2016
Ran review – Kurosawa’s masterful epic reissued
The Japanese film-maker’s adaptation of King Lear is still visually and dramatically breathtaking
March 2016
Ran review – Kurosawa’s dark, epic version of King Lear
Ran: Akira Kurosawa’s last great masterpiece
February 2016
Trailer park
Ran: trailer for the restored Kurosawa classic - video
Watch the trailer for a 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s take on King Lear, set amid the civil war of 16th-century Japan
