Cinematheque: Kurosawa Centennial

Kurosawa favorite Mifune plays a young executive who hunts down his father’s killer in this superb thriller. Probably one of Kurosawa’s most underrated films, The Bed Sleep Well, combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan. “Better than Shakespeare. . . The first thirty minutes seem to me as perfect as any film I have ever seen,” proclaims Francis Ford Coppola.