Barnes & Noble

With ringing moments of intensity and a radical manipulation of time, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon stands legitimately alongside Citizen Kane as one of the movies that altered the rules of cinematic storytelling. Based on two short stories by author Ryunosuke Akutagawa ("In a Grove" and "Rashomon"), the movie is set in 12th-century Kyoto and centers around a trial in a prison courtyard. Four defendants -- the bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune); a young woman, Masago (Machino Kyo); the spirit of her samurai husband, Takehiro (Masayuki Mori); and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) -- each offer varied and often contradictory versions of an incident, the only certain elements of which are a rape, a death, and an ambush. Teasing and hooking a viewer at the same time, Kurosawa mines the fallibility of memory, in the process framing human unpredictability, selfishness, and weakness with multiple points of view. The movie is also distinguished by superior performances by Mifune and Kyo. Filmmakers have chased Kurosawa's achievement for years -- recent movies like Memento, The Usual Suspects, and Jim Jarmusch's overt homage Ghost Dog all pay some tariff to Rashomon's unusual pulse and rhythm. The Criterion Collection DVD edition of this classic boasts a glistening restored image and adds two fantastic extras to the mix: The World of Kazuo Miyagawa, a documentary on Rashomon's painstaking, passionate cinematographer, plus a moving tribute from Robert Altman. Eddy Crouse

All Movie Guide

This landmark film is a brilliant exploration of truth and human weakness. It opens with a priest, a woodcutter, and a peasant taking refuge from a downpour beneath a ruined gate in 12th-century Japan. The priest and the woodcutter, each looking stricken, discuss the trial of a notorious bandit for rape and murder. As the retelling of the trial unfolds, the participants in the crime -- the bandit (Toshiro Mifune), the rape victim (Machiko Kyo), and the murdered man (Masayuki Mori) -- tell their plausible though completely incompatible versions of the story. In the bandit's version, he and the man wage a spirited duel after the rape, resulting in the man's death. In the woman's testimony, she is spurned by her husband after being raped. Hysterical with grief, she kills him. In the man's version, speaking through the lips of a medium, the bandit beseeches the woman after the rape to go away with him. She insists that the bandit kill her husband first, which angers the bandit. He spurns her and leaves. The man kills himself. Seized with guilt, the woodcutter admits to the shocked priest and the commoner that he too witnessed the crime. His version is equally feasible, although his veracity is questioned when it is revealed that he stole a dagger from the crime scene. Just as all seems bleak and hopeless, a baby appears behind the gate. The commoner seizes the moment and steals the child's clothes, while the woodcutter redeems himself and humanity in the eyes of the troubled priest, by adopting the infant. Jonathan Crow

Product Details

• UPC: 715515032520
• Source: CRITERION
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: Dolby Digital Mono
• Language: Japanese
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:28:00
• Sales Rank: 7,354

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Essential Art House, Volume 1
• AK 100 - 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa

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