Letterboxd — Your life in film

The first half of this movie is a loving dissection of a small city's self-told mythology. Facts about the city's actual place in history swirl together with facts about its place in the imaginations of its proud residents. It's a Japanese version of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. I loved it! The extremely personal city history is one of my favorite genres. All the stories and fables and half-truths interconnect and intersect, giving the city such a powerful personality and narrative…

Added to: My 250 Favorite Films of All Time

In my humble opinion, I think all medical students should watch Red Beard before graduation, especially in the time of the epidemic. We need to remember, asides from medical science, we are dealing with human beings. We are treating their illness, yet we cannot neglect the systemic causes (the film stresses repeatedly the problem of poverty, and hence the ineffectuality of Government and inadequacy of national policy). The main plot of this…

Kurosawa’s humane moralism would be almost overly simplistic if it weren’t so powerfully put into practice by the film itself. Niide teaches Yasumoto that patients’ hearts need healing just as much as their bodies, and that poverty and ignorance are what these country doctors are really battling rather than individual sicknesses. And the chief method of tending to these patients becomes simply looking, really and truly seeing them; a sustained act of paying attention to those from whom the rest…

Kurosawa at his best; Mifune at his best.

This humanist masterpiece is often connected to Ikiru but really shares more DNA with earlier works. In this film, we have stoic doctors and the need for compassionate care in the face of the tragedy that is the human condition. The stoic care is reminiscent of Drunken Angel or The Quiet Duel - but here you can see those formative ideas brought to boil. It also feels like, at points, an achievement…

Red Beard était un film de derniers moments pour Kurosawa.
Le film marquerait la dernière fois que Kurosawa tournerait en noir et blanc, c'était son dernier film des années 60 et surtout c'était son dernier film avec Toshiro Mifune.

Alors que Red Beard démontre activement à son jeune stagiaire réticent que s'occuper des pauvres est plus gratifiant qu'une pratique de société, le film se déroule magnifiquement dans un étrange mélange d'émotion authentique, d'absurdité et de fantaisie poétique. 
Seul Kurosawa aurait…

I remain deeply suspicious of looking to art for moral instruction that extends any further than simple empathy, but if ever a movie showed us Life and How to Live It, it must be Red Beard. Kurosawa had already shown his affinity for the Russian masters, but here he really achieves the perfect blend of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with a film as panoramic as the former (Kurosawa truly makes widescreen seem like it's taking in the whole of a society)…

Adapted from Akahige Shinryōtan, a collection of short stories by Shūgorō Yamamoto, and Akira Kurosawa's final black and white film, Red Beard details a young medical intern's transformation from a greedy idealist into a pragmatic but caring doctor. Set in early 19th-century Japan, its characterisations are achieved through minimal contrivances allowing the actors to flesh out their roles. It follows Dr Kyojo Niide (Toshiro Mifune), better known as Red Beard, the head of a poverty-stricken community health clinic whose most recent intern, Dr…

Criterion Challenge 2023: 1/52
Je vais commencer tout de suite parce que jsuis pas très bon avec les Challenges. Ça donne souvent un peu l’impression d’avoir comme devoir de regarder les films pis des fois ça enlève un peu le fun de regarder des films même si j’suis vraiment content de ma sélection. 
Celui-là c’est mon premier de 3 Kinoshita et de plusieurs films japonais que je n’ai pas encore vus!☺️
Pour ce qui est de Ballad of Narayama, J’ai eu…