lawrence osborne

Beautiful, somber, surprisingly un-camp ( except for the vignette of the Dauphin, which needless to say was the only thing most critics thought was "fun" ). There is an unwavering gravity about Calamet in Michod's hands, Edgerton is a new kind of Falstaff, the war scenes are not adolescent, the cinematography of the woods of northern France and England is superbly sinister. The mood of melancholy and fatalism throughout is a thoughtful and likely accurate representation of the world of 1400 AD - or so it felt to me.

I love Kiyoshi Kurosawa and this like many of his recent works is subtle and strange - it's flawed, maybe, but intelligent and disquieting.

A beautiful debut