a review of 影武者

MANNVANUARY FOUR: For some reason I always conflated this on in my head with RAN (probably because of Tatsuya Nakadai?) and forgot about it as one of my big Kurosawa gaps, but now that I've caught up with it I think I might even like it better? Lots of twisty intrigue and a brilliant double performance by Nakadai, plus some absolutely impossible-seeming practically staged and photographed battle sequences. These may have been technically outdone in terms of scale by CGI (to varying results) in the last 25 years, but it's still impressive to look back and realize that Kurosawa did something that feels absolutely epic by ACTUALLY getting all of those actual actors and costumes and horses and letting them run around on an actual unspoiled landscape.