Blu-ray Review: Criterion's Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) (1954) and The Magician (Ansiktet) (1958)

by Tony Dayoub

Today is the fifteenth, the point mid-month when the Criterion Collection typically reveals what new DVDs and Blu-rays they have in store for us three months from now. As we await with bated breath, let's take a brief look at two of their newest Blu-ray releases, the classic Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) and The Magician (Ansiktet).

Movie Review: The Outrage (1964)

by Tony Dayoub

Martin Ritt's The Outrage is one of the more offbeat stabs Hollywood has taken at westernizing (both in the literal and the genre sense) a Kurosawa film. Like The Magnificent Seven (1960) before it, as well as the former's Italian contemporary, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the change of setting from feudal Japan to the Old West may seem at first glance to be the only difference in this almost scene-for-scene translation of the Japanese director's Rashomon. But Rashomon's focus on the perception of moral responsibility subtly shifts to a study of class hierarchy in this ambitious, more deliberately-paced, dreamlike western.