Tatsuya Nakadai in New York.

"From samurai showdowns to yearning melodramas, Akira Kurosawa to Masaki Kobayashi, the Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai has been, at his best, a chameleon of genre, mood, and directorial style," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "Film Forum's long-planned multi-week series devoted to this versatile, handsome star, which begins Friday, harvests his 50-year career to yield a healthy portion of the most satisfying output from a reliable boom time in Japanese cinema."

"He was the gun-toting punk in Yojimbo (1961), the do-or-die warrior in Sanjuro (1962) and the determined police detective in High and Low (1963). You could also bring up the smitten bar owner in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960); the woodcutter in J-horror's Rosetta stone, Kwaidan (1964); or the Lear-like lion in winter of Ran (1985)." And David Fear talks with him for Time Out New York.

Updated through 6/24.

"The line-up features plenty of obscure and hard-to-find titles, like Kihachi Okamoto's Age of Assassins and Kon Ichikawa's I Am a Cat, an adaptation of the novel by the celebrated Natsume Soseki," notes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "It also features canonical Nakadai performances, like Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another, Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Kobayashi's The Human Condition, the long unavailable nine-hour epic that propelled Nakadai to prominence."

Through July 17.

Earlier: Chris Fujiwara at Moving Image Source and Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times.

Update, 6/21: "A handsome, roguish fellow equally well suited for hero or villain roles, and best known for playing characters plagued by doubt or moral uncertainty, Nakadai has been called the Japanese equivalent of Marlon Brando or Steve McQueen," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "As that might suggest, Nakadai is identified with the massive social changes of postwar Japan, but calling him a rebel or bad boy isn't quite accurate or sufficient."

Updates, 6/24: "As a retrospective within a retrospective, Film Forum's ongoing tribute to the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai features five films directed by Japan's grand master of filmmaking, Akira Kurosawa." Bruce Bennett revisits them in the New York Sun.

Online listening tip. Get this: Nakadai is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2008 6:36 AM