The Japanese jack-of-all-genres becomes master of yet one more with a lush and engrossing adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa's prizewinning historical novel detailing palace intrigue in the besieged court of a samurai nobleman.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Janus Films, Cannes Film Festival Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown — or in this case, the samurai topknot — in Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s absorbing, clean-lined literary adaptation, for which the veteran filmmaker brings to life a storied period of swirling discontent in Japanese history with such evocative restraint that it becomes distinctly modern. And yet this is no work of genre deconstruction, and there’s little of Kurosawa’s familiar, eerie experimentation with narrative form. Instead, ‘Samurai’ is classical, if pared-back, in approach — at once a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice.
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