{"id":19077,"date":"2026-10-04T21:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T01:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=19077"},"modified":"2026-10-03T11:06:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T15:06:19","slug":"the-samurai-and-the-prisoner-2026-kiyoshi-kurosawa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/19077","title":{"rendered":"The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/17845\">Gemini<\/a><\/em> and <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2755\">Bird People In China<\/a><\/em>) betrays the country&#8217;s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (<em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/17546\">Cloud<\/a><\/em> scammer Masaki Suda).  Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn&#8217;t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot.  All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord&#8217;s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka from <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/1008\">Noriko&#8217;s Dinner Table<\/a><\/em>) who staged all three mysteries.  She and the prisoner convince lord MM to run away from the castle and live a long life drinking tea instead of continuing to fight.  Movie looked great, my first Kiyoshi movie in theaters since <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2796\">Tokyo Sonata<\/a><\/em>, but it does go on, I wasn&#8217;t so invested in the mystery plot, and I had to laugh when I realized it&#8217;s showing some of the same events as Kitano&#8217;s <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/16632\">Kubi<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country&#8217;s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn&#8217;t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2643,2448,36,176,1277],"class_list":["post-19077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2020s","tag-decapitation","tag-japan","tag-kiyoshi-kurosawa","tag-samurai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19077"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19099,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19077\/revisions\/19099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}