Kiyoshi Kurosawa Has Finally Made His Samurai Movie

Masahiro Motoki as Lord Murashige in 'The Samurai and the Prisoner'

Cannes Film Festival

If there’s a great crime of recent world cinema, it’s that Kiyoshi Kurosawa hasn’t been granted bigger budgets. The 70-year-old Japanese auteur has consistently spun masterful moviemaking from a relative shoestring over the four and a half decades of his prolific and deeply influential career.

Kurosawa has explored genres with a restlessness and inventiveness few directors of his generation can match: from the now-classic serial killer procedural Cure (1997) to the dread-soaked J-horror landmark Pulse (2001), the lacerating family drama Tokyo Sonata (Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner of 2008), the haunting wartime mystery Wife of a Spy (best director at Venice in 2020), and most recently Cloud, the psychological action film that landed on numerous critics’ 2025 best-of lists. In nearly every case, he has worked on production budgets that would barely cover the catering costs on a Hollywood feature of comparable ambition.

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Kurosawa came of age during an era of sharp contraction for the Japanese film business, after the rise of television had eroded the dominance of the country’s once-fabled movie studios. The film business responded to the period’s challenges with the rise of “pink eiga,” a soft-core erotic genre that trafficked in the nudity and violence that couldn’t be shown on TV, becoming one of Japan’s most bankable production engines through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The genre also proved an unexpectedly fertile training ground for a generation of Japanese directors — among them future Oscar winner Yojiro Takita (Departures), Masayuki Suo (Shall We Dance?), Koji Wakamatsu — and Kurosawa, whose 1983 feature debut Kandagawa Pervert Wars was characteristically trashy but also a highly film-literate riff on Rear Window by Hitchcock, the filmmaker who would later come to be seen as his greatest influence.

It was Cure, though, that eventually announced Kurosawa as a singular voice in world cinema. A beguiling, hypnotic study of a Tokyo detective (the great Koji Yakusho) investigating a series of murders committed by ordinary people who can’t seem to explain what made them do it, the film was made for less than $1 million and performed poorly upon its release in Japan, but steadily grew in global reputation over the nearly three decades since its release. As fans of the Criterion Closet will well know, it has been regularly hailed as a landmark: Bong Joon Ho has ranked it among the 10 greatest films of all time, and Ari Aster once said, “There is an argument to be made that Cure, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is the greatest movie ever made.”

In the intervening years, Kurosawa has also extended his imprint on Japanese cinema as a teacher. During his time as a professor of film studies at Tokyo University of the Arts, he taught two aspiring filmmakers who grew into some of Japan’s most accomplished new voices: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose Drive My Car won the best international feature Oscar in 2022, and Koji Fukada, whose 2016 drama Harmonium won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. Both are in competition for the Palme d’Or this year, with films that have drawn some of the festival’s strongest early reviews: Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden and Fukada’s Nagi Notes.

“Kiyoshi Kurosawa has this ability to tell incredibly powerful stories solely through the way he works with moving images — without even trying to peer into a character’s mind by the use of dialogue. He’s a pure filmmaker,” Fukada tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Every student wants to compete with their teacher one day, but I realized early on that there was no way I would ever surpass him if I tried to make movies the way he does. So I had to go away and develop my own style — which is something he allowed and encouraged me to do. I’ve loved his films since I was a teenager, but I also really credit him with helping me find my own voice.”

“And I don’t think I’ll ever surpass him, by the way,” Fukada adds.

The master will be side by side with his star pupils in Cannes this year — and although his own film is showing in the festival’s Cannes Premieres section rather than the main competition, it will arrive as a long-hoped-for event among international film buffs.

Kurosawa’s new film fills a conspicuous absence in his diverse filmography: For roughly his 30th feature, he has finally made a classic samurai movie.

The new feature, The Samurai and the Prisoner, is set in 16th century Japan during the late Sengoku, or Warring States, period, and adapted from Hono