Alexander says: “Winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign language Film, and Kurosawa’s only time shooting outside of Japan, this is the wonderful story of the friendship between a Russian officer and a man of the wilderness. At once epic and intimate, it has, in my opinion, one of the best-ever endings of a film. Was there nothing Kurosawa could not do?”

“One of the most beautifully composed and photographed of Kurosawa’s films, Dersu Uzala visually illustrates its theme—in Arseniev’s words: ‘Man is too small to face the vastness of nature.’ The camera is always at eye level: It is through the human eye that the vastness of the steppes is viewed, and it is the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film.” — Donald Richie