Throne of Blood

"Throne Of Blood captures the spirit of Shakespeare's writing, as the driving rain, swirling fog and screeching animals lend metaphorical weight to this tale of murderous human ambition."

"It's visually ravishing, as you would expect, employing compositional tableaux from the Noh drama, high contrast photography, and extraordinary images of rain, galloping horses, the birds fleeing from the forest."

"No doubt about it now: Japan's Akira Kurosawa must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema."

"No stage production could match Kurosawa's Birnam Wood, and, in his final framing of the hero - a human hedgehog, stuck with arrows - he conjures a tragedy not laden with grandeur but pierced, like a dream, by the absurd."

"We label it amusing because lightly is the only way to take this substantially serio-comic rendering of the story of an ambitious Scot into a form that combines characteristics of the Japanese No theatre and the American Western film."

"Throne Of Blood defeats categorisation. It remains a landmark of visual strength, permeated by a particularly Japanese sensibility, and is possibly the finest Shakespearean adaptation ever committed to the screen."

"Throne of Blood spectacularly transforms the source play - turning it into a terrifying journey through darkness, evil, and despair."