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Mifune: The Last Samurai

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Japan · 2016
1h 21m
Director Steven Okazaki
Starring Keanu Reeves, Kyōko Kagawa, Yōko Tsukasa, Yoshio Tsuchiya
Genre Documentary

The film explores the accidental career of Toshiro Mifune, one of the true giants of world cinema. He made 16 remarkable films with director Akira Kurosawa during the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema, including Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo. Together, they shocked audiences and influenced filmmaking around the world.

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What are critics saying?

80

TheWrap by

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.

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

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

A thin, dull, and by-the-numbers biography that fails to capture its subject’s irrepressible spirit or properly contextualize his importance.

67

The Film Stage by Ed Frankl

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

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

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

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

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.

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