Throne of Blood

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Year Released: 1957
Rating: 1.5

I'm baffled by the critical reception this has received, since I found it (as well as two film-going colleagues) to be substantially poor Kurosawa, who dresses up Macbeth as a samurai story and then leaves it at that. The Lady Macbeth here is never close to convincing - her husband has no real reason to believe her - and Mifune's performance goes from hostile to angry to furious (his bug-eyed yelling is pretty amusing). The ghostly aspects don't come close to Kwaidan or Ugetsu Monogatari, and if you're very familiar with Shakespeare, rarely inspired (the death-by-arrows finale is justly famous). A monotonous, below average experience - compare and contrast to his majestic Ran, which was a heated, passionate and - I suspect - more personal film.