He ditches the "not born of woman" silliness and makes Macbeth's demise a direct result of his arrogance re: the wood of Birnam gambit (i.e. he stakes his men's loyalty on the forest not approaching, so when it does, and they realize what's up, they murder him.) It's simply one of the best endings in film.

The film is crazy uneven, but it's also my favorite Mifune performance. If there was a role he was born to play, it was Dostoevsky's Rogozhin.

At the risk of blasphemy: I think Kurosawa improves on Shakespeare's ending. To improve on Shakespeare is no small feat.

At the same time, that coiled-up intensity is what makes my favorite Mifune performance, Denkichi Akama in The Idiot, work so well. And as much as I think Shimura was a better all-around actor, I don't think he had that kind of feral, sexual violence in him to pull something like that off.

Years and years ago some website put together a list of the "Best Actors of All Time" based on some equation that weighted number and acclaim of films. The only reason I remember this was because Takashi Shimura came out #1, which was a pleasant surprise (surprise that the study's breadth was so wide, not that he was…

I'll back you up on cray. That's an abomination.

Right, but English word formation sometimes bases its productivity on existing forms themselves, but even without the underlying basis of those existing forms. Words that would otherwise be linguistically impossible include: homosexual, gumption, automobile, or the attachment of plural -s to words not from Germanic…

Try telling that to Peruvians.

There are only two collections that I know of: Four Stories is extremely difficult to find, but Beyond the Curve has most of his stories, and there are plenty of copies available online.

Brandon: it's funny that included the film version of Woman in the Dunes on your list, because high on my list this year would be 'discovering' Kobo Abe, the author of the book. The book version is amazing (the movie hews very closely to it), and I'm halfway through his (weird, weird) novella The Box Man right now.

It just takes a certain mindset, but once it "clicks"…. I've read it three or four times, and it's one of the most purely enjoyable books I own.

I understand adapting short stories into films, and I understand that often involves making changes to the source material, but why would you choose a particular short story only to film the opposite of everything that story is doing? It's like saying "I really want a film version of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery',…

Lars von Trier would be happy to find out that he directed The Celebration, but it might upset Thomas Vinterberg.

Those of us with husbands silently nod in assent.

No real pattern to it. Sometimes your critics champion Citizen Kane and your audiences reject it; sometimes the critics go crazy for Cheers for Miss Bishop, and… what? Sometimes the audiences grab onto movies like Lon Chaney's The Wolfman and make it a classic despite the critics; sometimes they… Well, all these…

You're out of order!

Personal favorite: Robert Donat's impromptu political speech in The 39 Steps, and its swing from desperate humor, to just plain desperate, to unexpectedly fiery rhetoric. Gives me chills every time.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I think "Chekhovian" is about something more intangible than thematic content (mostly: dialogue, mood), and in that respect, he's still all over the place.

This is where the AV Club's commenters berate the AV Club's commenters for having such terrible taste. Will we approach some kind of internet singularity?

Oh, man… I won't disagree about Ibsen, but your reading of Chekhov is so, so off. It wasn't the thematic content of his plays that made him so widely influential.