Stray Dogs

A pair of new films, directed by filmmakers from Brooklyn, reflects the resilience of the noir-ish New York crime thriller – the genre of The Naked City (1948), Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The French Connection (1971) – but turns out to reveal something else as well: the continuing influence of Akira Kurosawa. With Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee offers a remake of one of Kurosawa’s gendaigeki or stories of contemporary Japan, High and Low (1963), about a kidnap gone wrong, while Darren Aronofsky, in the frenetic wrong-man caper Caught Stealing, revisits his formative relationship with a Kurosawa character, the pincered lone wolf or ronin from the jidaigeki or period piece Yojimbo (1961), which Pauline Kael hailed as the ‘first great shaggy-man movie’.