“Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.” “That’s not how I remember it.” A pretty much perfect joke from The Simpsons that it took me years to understand and even longer to actually watch the thing itself. Its a classic Kurosawa film, you will have heard the premise even if you can’t put the name to it: a man is murdered in the woods, three eye-witness testimonies disagree as to what exactly happened (made slightly more fun by the fact that the third eye-witness is the murder victim himself). Conceptually, you’d hope for there to be a subtext of how these three stories combine to tell the actual truth. But, weirdly, no. You never quite get the release to the built-up tension, and Kurosawa doesn’t really do much to explore the themes that would obviously present themselves. The film is artistically interesting in how its shot, and intellectually interesting in that the conceit could have lots to it, but all in all it kind of left me cold. In the end, there’s not much beyond the conceit, and it’s not a particularly compelling story to be told if you strip that away from the whole. Perhaps over-rated, but I’ve yet to see any other Kurosawa, so let’s hope this is an outlier.