Kurosawa somehow manages to imbue every moment of this three-hour-plus movie with the transcendent vitality and intelligence of a great Victorian novel.

Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard is assembled with the complexity and depth of a good 19th-century novel, and it is a pleasure, in a time of stylishly fragmented films, to watch a director taking the time to fully develop his characters.

A mature work that merits the term most apply to it: Dostoyevskian.

The final collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and Japanese icon Toshiro Mifune is one of Kurosawa's most ambitious, personal, and heartfelt films.