Samurai Rebellion

Masaki Kobayashi was a great Japanese filmmaker who’s been overshadowed by Akira Kurosawa over time. He worked in the samurai genre several times, much as Kurosawa did, but he was far more political. His work functioned as scathing critiques of contemporary Japanese life, in particular the propensity for people to set aside their own desires and rights for the efficacy of the larger system around them. What Kobayashi does so well is to generalize that point thematically and wrap it in the pa...