From the moment a drill instructor runs out with a sashaying gait with a Groucho Marx mustache in the opening shots, you know you’re in for a treat. Here, the militarism that would engulf the early Showa period is still in comical infancy, and the lads who assemble for inspection are a haplessly uncoordinated lot. Indeed, there's even a sense of rebellion in Tokihiko Okada's Shinji, a refusal to go along with literal marching orders that is here rendered as…

If Dodes'ka-den showed a filmmaker's inner turmoil in trying to balance his love for humanity with his loathing of a world he saw going wrong, Dersu Uzala might be said to be the ragged recovery movie. Taking the filmmaker out of his homeland, it finds him turning to an intimate work of Russian literature that he, of course, blows up to massive proportions. This has all the trappings of a late Ford, paradoxically vast and dwarfing but bucolic and sharply…

The great tragedy of Kevin Feige is that, beyond raking in a mountain of cash as the head of Marvel Studios, he truly wants to be seen as an impresario of artists. The recent dust-up caused by Martin Scorsese staring holes through Disney's stunt-casting of noteworthy emerging filmmakers to lend clout to a method of filmmaking dictated by studio notes and franchise bible supervisors punctured this self-delusion and prompted a wave of pathetic self-defensiveness in which the CEO was called…