Yes, its Macbeth, so we know how the story turns out. Yes, its 52 years old. And yes, its a black-and-white samurai movie. But I will always retain my love for Throne of Blood, which this week begins a series of four Akira Kurosawa classics (through March 12). The great Toshiro Mifune plays the usurper in medieval Japan; Isuzu Yamada is the wife who goads him to murder and madness. Naturalism isnt the point to their performances, which range from Noh theater gestures to boisterous physicality. A malign wood spirit whispers destiny in Mifunes ear, and all his good sense pours out the other. Mens lives are as meaningless as the lives of insects, declares the freaky albino soothsayer. Throne shows how the marching, screaming, banner-waving soldierswith Mifune leading them into carnageultimately resort to a kind of mindless, swarming insect behavior. And all for whata remote wooden castle in the middle of a miserable, misty, wind-whipped forest? Says Yamada, Ambition makes a man. And it destroys him, too. (NR) BRIAN MILLER
Feb. 13-19, 7 & 9 p.m., 2009
