Kenji Mizoguchi

(Criterion Streaming, March 2021) With apologies to any fan of the form, my interest for historical samurai film is almost completely non-existent, especially after seeing the best of what the genre had to offer from Akira Kurosawa. Ugetsu is often mentioned in the same breath as those classics — it hails from the same period as Rashomon and Seven Samurai, had a roughly similar impact on creating interest in Japanese films in the West, and clearly plays along similar lines. You can find it in the Criterion collection and a few best-of lists. (Roger Ebert notably loved it, ranking it as one of his Great Movies.)  Alas, I tend to watch those films with a sense of obligation and list-checking rather than expecting any enjoyment out of the result. Director Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu slightly surpassed those low expectations by throwing slightly more into the mix than I expected — it eventually becomes a supernatural ghost story about love and grief, wrapped into decent visual style. I’m still not all that bowled over by the result, but in this subgenre, anything that ranks as “interesting” is a small victory of sorts.