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In what is definitely one of the greatest transitions in movie history, former actor Juzo Itami wrote and directed his first film in 1984, “The Funeral” which ended up netting five Japanese Academy Awards in 1985, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor for Tsutomu Yamazaki, while it also came first in the annual Kinema Junpo critics' poll. The production was financed by Itami and his wife Nobuko Miyamoto, along with a friend of theirs, the cake mogul Yasushi Tamaoki, and was distributed by Atg. The script was inspired by Itami's own experience of his father-in-law's funeral, while it was shot in the house of the family, and the son of the couple also played a part.

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The movie begins with the narrator introducing us to an elderly couple, Shinkichi Amamiya and his wife, Kikue, just before the former has...

In six decades of filmmaking and thirty plus titles in his filmography, it’s nearly impossible to determine the weighted importance concerning a number of the influential works from Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa, considered by many to be among the most notable directors from Japan, alongside peers such as Mizoguchi and Ozu. Instead, it’s easier to discuss his work in strategic measures regarding theme or motif, such as his famed Shakespearean adaptations or epic Samurai classics, pillaged endlessly by Western filmmakers in proceeding generations. But certainly a definite standout is his 1952 title, Ikiru, which roughly translates as “to live.” A powerfully humanistic title examining the significance of life as something only to be rightly cherished when seen through the lens of death, it stands at the slender end of a filmography generally examining human tendency for apathy, revenge, and other plateaus of self-destructive forces. Moving without being sentimental, Kurosawa...

DVD Rating: 4.0/5.0 Chicago – I’m not sure, but I think there are more Akira Kurosawa titles available in the Criterion Collection than any other filmmaker. His classic films like “Ran,” “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai,” and “Yojimbo” have been critically acclaimed releases for the influential series of DVDs. His 24th title in the Criterion Collection is last week’s “Dodes’da Ken,” one of the greatest directors of all time’s first film in color.

1970’s “Dodes’da Ken” came five years after the great “Red Beard” and five years before “Dersu Uzala” and a decade before “Kagemusha”. The film was made at a tumultuous time in Kurosawa’s personal life and was critically panned in his home country despite being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Dodes’da Ken was released on DVD on March 17th, 2009.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

According to some sources, the...