After Rashomon and Seven Samurai, this film is even more of a disappointment because of the traces it bears of a cinematic Grand Master at work.

| Mar 30, 2020

Unavoidable consequence of human ambition.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 13, 2014

No doubt about it now: Japan's Akira Kurosawa must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema.

| Mar 4, 2013

No stage production could match Kurosawa's Birnam Wood, and, in his final framing of the hero -- a human hedgehog, stuck with arrows -- he conjures a tragedy not laden with grandeur but pierced, like a dream, by the absurd.

| Mar 4, 2013

Throne Of Blood defeats categorisation. It remains a landmark of visual strength, permeated by a particularly Japanese sensibility, and is possibly the finest Shakespearean adaptation ever committed to the screen.

| Mar 4, 2013

Akira Kurosawa's remarkable 1957 restaging of Macbeth in samurai and expressionist terms is unquestionably one of his finest works -- charged with energy, imagination, and, in keeping with the subject, sheer horror.

| Jul 1, 2008

With its all-pervading sense of doom, this is a serious contender for the finest celluloid Shakespeare of them all.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2006

It's visually ravishing, as you would expect, employing compositional tableaux from the Noh drama, high contrast photography, and extraordinary images of rain, galloping horses, the birds fleeing from the forest.

| Feb 9, 2006

Widely regarded as one of the most successful film adaptations of a Bard play.

Full Review | Jun 16, 2003

We label it amusing because lightly is the only way to take this substantially serio-comic rendering of the story of an ambitious Scot into a form that combines characteristics of the Japanese No theatre and the American Western film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 20, 2003

Throne of Blood is the grizzliest Macbeth you're likely ever to see.

| Mar 10, 2003

Throne of Blood spectacularly transforms the source play -- turning it into a terrifying journey through darkness, evil, and despair.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 8, 2002

The director's vision of Macbeth as a samurai is still a stunning reading, not merely of Shakespeare, but of history, power and sexual politics.

| Jan 6, 2002

This film is a must see for anyone who appreciates film as well as anyone who loves Shakespeare, two very laudable conditions.

| Jan 1, 2000