Inagaki struggles a little with clumsy pacing and awkward transitions to and from scenes, but there's a lot of visual beauty to his fog-drenched landscapes emphasizing the rawness of the wilderness surrounding the villages and towns of Japan. It's a harsh, feral world out there, which is exactly what Musashi endures in his early period of exile. This is a also a perfect role for Mifune the same year as Seven Samurai. As the priest explains, he's like a wild…

For the life of me I can't understand how fans find anything to give a shit about in these films.

There's no personality, no stakes, no energy on display from either the cast or the directors. In the Russo brothers, I think Marvel have found their ideal directors: artless, visionless servants of an episodic TV structure. The action isn't exactly unintelligible (Marvel films are too insidious to be completely unsound), but it's passionless: hyperkinetic yet perfunctory. The Russo brothers' "style"…

Both experiential and texturally rich as well as intellectually alive. Silence is built around a series of religious tests, moral riddles whose consequences grow more and more thorny. Or rather, the film burrows deeper and deeper into manifestations of the same dilemma: the stubborn pride of conviction and the distance between heart and action.

It's an extremely complex exploration of these ideas, but the film is tactile as well as brainy. Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography beautifully captures the indifference of the…