Best TV shows and movies streaming in Australia this month
Discover what’s coming to Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Prime Video and others in July, including The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Sheep Detectives and Christopher Nolan’s back catalogue
November 2025
Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor of Ran, Yojimbo and Harakiri, dies aged 92
Star of Japan’s cinematic golden age, who collaborated with Kurosawa and played the lead in Kobayashi’s Human Condition trilogy, died from pneumonia
July 2025
King Lear is an absolute masterpiece – as told by Akira Kurosawa rather than Shakespeare
Michael Billington
The tragedy’s mythic quality appeals to adapters the world over but the Japanese film-maker’s Ran, now rereleased, manages to solve the play’s problems
May 2025
Highest 2 Lowest review – Spike Lee and Denzel Washington remake Kurosawa in fine style
Akira Kurosawa’s downbeat noir High and Low is retooled with Washington on magnificent form as a record producer whose godson is kidnapped by mistake
January 2025
Stray Dog/High and Low review – Kurosawa lifts crime drama to astonishing new peaks
Drawing on hardboiled US fiction, as American film had fed on his own Seven Samurai, the director brings unforgettable intensity to his anxious noir
February 2024
Spike Lee and Denzel Washington reuniting for Akira Kurosawa remake
The pair, who last worked together on 2006’s Inside Man, will reimagine the 1963 crime drama High and Low for Apple and A24
Rashomon: Akira Kurosawa’s truly daring film is still electrifying
20 greatest Venice film festival Golden Lion winners – ranked!
May 2023
Guy Lodge's streaming and DVDs
Streaming: the best winners of Cannes’ Palme d’Or
Twenty-one films will vie for the top spot at the 76th Cannes film festival, which starts next week, hoping to join the roll call of past classics, from Taxi Driver and M*A*S*H to Parasite
November 2022
Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Living review – Bill Nighy tackles life and death in exquisitely sad drama
A gentle and poignant Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru about a man dealing with a terminal diagnosis
January 2022
Macbeth movies have been foul and fair – Joel Coen’s is a stunner
The Tragedy of Macbeth follows in the footsteps of Orson Welles’s bold 1948 film, which showed how imagination can turn Shakespeare’s text into more than just a costume epic
December 2021
Emi Wada obituary
Costume designer who won an Oscar for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, and created John Gielgud’s cloak in Prospero’s Books
October 2021
Seven Samurai review – an epic primal myth that pulsates through cinema
Akira Kurosawa’s tale of ascetic mercenaries brought together for a single job inspired endless imitations, but the original has lost none of its magic
May 2020
The classic film I've never seen
I've never seen … The Magnificent Seven
In one sense this is a glorified rip-off that guts Kurosawa’s thoughtful original, repackages it with a stylish title and fills it with guns … but it’s fun!
Another big shift in direction for Simpson, with anime visuals, glam rock, disco and grunge ornamenting never-more-country lyrics: it’s extraordinary
February 2019
Ranked
The best Shakespeare films – ranked!
Kenneth Branagh graduates from player to playwright this week for All is True, in which he plays an ailing Bard. But which big-screen Shakey is the greatest?
November 2018
Seven Samurai tops critics' poll of best foreign-language films
Akira Kurosawa epic beats Bicycle Thieves to top of BBC’s 100-strong list that includes just four female-directed films
March 2018
My favourite film decade
From The Naked City to Double Indemnity – why the 1940s is my favourite film decade
War changed everything, destroying whole film industries and heralding a new era of realism, grit and shoots on location
October 2016
Film blog
Ingmar Bergman's Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka: intriguing, sexy and intense
The newly discovered screenplay suggests the then 51-year-old film-maker reacting to the sexual liberation of the 1960s in characteristic fashion
