4/5 starsKiyoshi Kurosawa launched his directorial career in the mid-1980s by turning one of the staples of Japanese cinema, the erotic “pink film”, into something steeped in style, politics and cinephilia.Four decades on, the 70-year-old has taken another much-loved Japanese genre, the samurai drama, and stripped it of its swashbuckling conventions to deliver an atmospheric – and mostly action-free – suspense thriller that debunks myths of honour, reverence and reckless bravery in war.An adaptation of a novel by Honobu Yonezawa, The Samurai and the Prisoner – also known as Kokurojo – is intelligent, intriguing and captivating throughout its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, with sturdy storytelling, immaculate production design and suitably spartan camerawork.It is hardly a surprise that younger Japanese auteurs such as Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Koji Fukada and Yukiko Sode attended the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival to pay tribute to the director.Set amid the feudal wars sweeping across Japan at the end of the 16th century, Kurosawa’s film unfolds mostly within Arioka Castle, where the warlord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) is defending against a year-long siege by his mentor-turned-nemesis Oda Nobunaga.