80
The real accomplishment of Mifune: The Last Samurai, and perhaps of any successful documentary about cinema history, is that it makes you want to run out and see the movies all over again.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
It’s a brisk and energetic primer for those who don’t know his movies or are ready to watch them again. And it doubles as a history of the chanbara (sword fighting) genre, providing an opportunity to sample clips from seldom-seen or partially lost silent films.
42
A thin, dull, and by-the-numbers biography that fails to capture its subject’s irrepressible spirit or properly contextualize his importance.
67
Mifune: The Last Samurai, the well-assembled documentary on the life of actor Toshirô Mifune, the long-time Akira Kurosawa collaborator, should be a worthy introduction to one of Japanese cinema’s greatest icons, if a little light on more revelatory findings.
75
What the movie is very good at revealing and expanding upon is how this reluctant actor became such a masterful one.
50
Slant Magazine by Keith Watson
In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.
75
Mifune: The Last Samurai is less a comprehensive overview of the actor’s life than it is an analysis of what that life meant.
75
Even if it is too brief and leaves too much out to be “definitive,” it serves up heaping helpings of Mifune’s film work and bits of home movies and the like to create a fascinating man-behind the stoic face/samurai icon below-the-topknot portrait of Mifune.
50
Okazaki gets close to, but never sheds enough light on, Mifune's elusive personality.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Farber
The subject is a rich one, but the film simply isn’t incisive enough.