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The 10 Best Performances in Akira Kurosawa Movies, Ranked
Dec 9, 2024
There are plenty of reasons why numerous Akira Kurosawa films are classics, and potentially even timeless, given how fantastically his best movies are paced, filmed, written, and acted. Acting is a skill separate from directing, of course, but good directors will tend to have filmographies filled with great performances, and so Kurosawa can be, at least in part, credited with how many great instances of acting his body of work contains.
Here's a rundown of great Akira Kurosawa movies that are all classics, at least in part, thanks to the fact that each has one or more great performances. To keep things interesting, there’s a limit of one performance per movie, which does mean snubbing six of the seven samurai in a particular 1954 movie, for instance. However, some actors will show up more than once, given Kurosawa had a few he used a number of times, and the best of them delivered the goods in a big way more than once.
10 Tatsuya Nakadai as Takeda Shingen/the Kagemusha
'Kagemusha' (1980)
A well-made and suitably grand epic, Kagemusha is perhaps one of Akira Kurosawa’s most underrated films, inevitably overshadowed by another large-scale movie he made in the 1980s (more on that later). Kagemusha has an intriguing premise that’s well-explored throughout, centering on a thief who’s made to be a stand-in for a warlord after it’s discovered that the two are identical, and the latter dies unexpectedly.
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