Secondary school dissection of Romeo & Juliet aside I've never read anything by Shakespeare, and I'm shamefully unfamiliar with much of Kurosawa's work, so it's no surprise, perhaps, that I wasn't as impressed by this as its reputation suggest I should be. This adaptation of the bard's Macbeth is one of Kurosawa's classics but I have to say I found it hard going at times. Definitely a film you have to be in the mood to watch, it's without doubt a technically superb piece of work with some undeniably effective moments (the spooky witch in the woods, the famous rain of arrows, Isuzu Yamada's wonderfully manipulative Lady Asaji) and some overt symbolism that even I could grasp. So, on that level, the film works wonderfully. And yet I don't know, it just seems so emotionally detached from its characters that Washizu's inexorable descent into madness as he realises the ambitions fired by an encounter with the aforementioned witch in the Cobweb Forest failed to engage me. Assured direction, and superb cinematography make this a film that always has something to occupy the attentive viewer's mind, but the slow, by-the-numbers treatment left me feeling as if I had done a duty rather than indulged in a pleasure.
Review of Throne of Blood
