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It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The themes are all there. The actors are wonderful. The story comes with built-in drama and suspense. And it's directed by Akira Kurosawa! But, for me, it doesn't work. Sadly, I say this, because he is one of favorite directors.For a start, it's just too long (150 min.). The story is slowed down and dragged out, where it should have been tightened. In those rare moments where I did feel the tension start to build, another over-long scene came along and deflated the suspense.I thought the opening was ridiculous. Too many members of the press at a wedding that will introduce the audience to the story and its players. But the press, about 10 of them, watching the wedding and commenting along the way, when they should/would never have been allowed into such a private function. Like a Greek chorus, but ineffective and obvious. The master started his movie poorly.Biggest offense of the film: Too much telling, not enough showing. Characters let us know everything: Not only their own backstories, but everyone else's. Not only their own emotions, but also those of others. Instead of showing us these people in their world, we the audience are told everything. And I do mean everything. How can you have intrigue and suspense when you don't give your audience the opportunity for discovery. It's all laid out for us, with too much on-the-nose telling.I give it 5/10 because there are a few nice scenes, and Mifune is awesome...as always! But this is definitely my least favorite of ALL Kurosawa's films.

At a 2 hour 30 Minute running time, "The Bad Sleep Well" dips and dives as its narrative progresses. When I left my seat at the end however, I realised I had suddenly felt extremely satisfied and particularly moved at how events unfolded and how brutally honest they were portrayed in its characters and presentation.At a lavish wedding, a birthday cake is anonymously sent depicting an office building marked with a cross on the window where the groom's father committed suicide some time prior. This of course leads to discomfort for all attending, and in the next few weeks more and more unusual schemes seem to be affecting the company and some target officials. Who could possibly be doing this and for what gain or reason? What has remained particularly strong throughout the years is how Kurosawa has staged his conversations in this movie, there's a lot of them and rarely does he often cut from one face to the other. It's all done in superbly staged medium close up shots, and the performances of Kurosawa regulars Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune and return of Masayuki Mori from "Rashomon" (1950), is all wonderfully worth checking out.Final Verdict: Not much to say other than it's another one of Kurosawa's best outside of his Samurai epics, and a great "pseudo" Shakespearean tale also. 9/10.

Akira Kurosawa's 1960 black and white film, The Bad Sleep Well (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru), is often compared to William Shakespeare's Hamlet, but it's an inapt comparison for, while Shakespeare's play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa's film has far more relevance, realism, and complexity, even if, like Hamlet, it's a high class melodrama. The film was written by Kurosawa and four collaborators- Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni. Because it has Shakespearean pedigree, and is not set in medieval Japan, this film has not gotten its proper due, in comparison with the classics that Kurosawa made earlier in his career, such as Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. But, it should, for, despite its melodramatic bent, and film noir roots- heightened by Masaru Sato's wonderful soundtrack, which alternates the darkness of certain moments with almost carnivalesque music, the film is superbly paced and well written, for within the film's opening sequences at a corporate wedding, fully Westernized with a Here Comes The Bride rendition, covered by the jackal-like press- reminiscent of the paparazzi in the prior year's Federico Fellini masterpiece La Dolce Vita, ready to pounce on any irregularity, because of a budding scandal, and the subsequent brilliant montage of newspaper headlines that puts those used by Hollywood in pre-World War Two gangster films to shame, the bulk of the film's narrative setup is displayed, and allowed to unravel for the next two hours, albeit almost never following the standard melodramatic arc of allowing the characters' dumbest possible actions dictate the plot. Because of this, the film's ending is both realistic, and one of the most chilling in film history. Perhaps only Dr. Strangelove's scenes of Armageddon are more chilling, however leavened by that film's final scenes' editing.The cinematography, by longtime Godzilla series mainstay Yuzuru Aizawa, is superb. The scenes where Nishi and Wada drive Shirai mad are masterful example of pure black and white cinematography that rivals the best of the masterful Carl Theodor Dreyer. And while all the acting is first rate by the supporting cast, with the usual stellar work of Takashi Shimura as Moriyama, the perfectly restrained evil of Masayuki Mori as Iwabuchi, not to mention the wonderfully over the top looniness of Kô Nishimura as Shirai, the stellar cravenness of Kamatari Fujiwara as Wada, the semi-incestuous off kilter performance of Tatsuya Mihashi as Tatsuo, and the hammy enigmatic performance of Takeshi Katô as Itakura (the real Nishi), this film belongs to Toshirô Mifune as Nishi (the real Itakura), for, unlike his wildly over the top-however terrific, work in Rashomon and Seven Samurai, he truly gets to display the full range of his acting chops in his boiling rages- he declares, when trying to toss Shirai out the same window his father fell from, 'Even now they sleep soundly, with grins on their faces. I won't stand for it! I can never hate them enough!', his hiding of them as a corporate secretary, his acts of kindness that ultimately do him in, and in his love tenderly restrained scenes with Yoshiko, especially one where he tells of how his obsession with his father after his death is only matched by the hatred he felt for the man before his death. His internalized anguish allows Mifune to act with small gestures, not grand ones, and scenery chewing gives way to real emoting. Of the three roles I've seen him in, this is his best….easily. It takes a good half hour of the film's unfolding, though, before Nishi even emerges as the film's central character, and puppetmaster- although, ultimately, he is no match for Iwabuchi, who's been doing it longer and better. That's how much confidence Kurosawa has in his filmic and narrative talents, for imagine a Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts film going a half hour into the plot without a major scene for them. Mifune was that big a star in his day, but the film is always bigger.The DVD, by The Criterion Collection, is shown in a 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, but lacks an English soundtrack, Considering the tremendous amount of white in the film, especially in the wedding scenes, the white subtitles are very difficult to read. There's also a trailer, and a thirty-three minute episode of the Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful To Create documentary series on the making of this film. The insert includes two essays- one by Chuck Stephens, of Film Comment, and one by director Michael Almereyda. The former is a lightweight take on the film and the latter a strained attempt at, yet again, linking the film to Hamlet.Despite such senseless flagellations, The Bad Sleep Well is an excellent film, and every bit as worthy of being talked about as a masterpiece, as are Ikiru and Seven Samurai. It is, if only because of the weak end of Rashomon, even better than that universally acknowledged classic, and far better than almost all the American film noirs that I've seen, despite its melodrama. If Shakespeare teaches one thing it's that the difference between true drama and melodrama is often only the excellence of its presentation. On that score, this film is a great drama, even if, ultimately and in the real world, the bad really do sleep well.

The Bad Sleep Well is one of the best revenge movies of all time. It stars the great Toshiro Mifune as a man seeking revenge against the people who forced his father into committing suicide. Unlike many revenge movies, The Bad Sleep Well doesn't glamorize its subject. Instead it shows how in trying to get retribution for a man who is now dead, Mifune ends up injuring himself and other people he loves who are still alive. There are a lot of beautiful and haunting images, like when we see a desperate man struggling to climb a volcano so he can throw himself in, or a number of scenes that are shot at the bombed out wreckage of an old WWII munitions plant. The bleak landscape mirrors the damaged lives of the movie's characters. Powerful and haunting, this is a movie that will follow you for days.