Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Madilyn Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

lreynaert 'Stray Dog' is Akira Kurosawa's 'Ladri di biciclette'. But, the movie doesn't reach the top level of Vittorio De Sica's masterpiece.In 'Stray Dog', the main tool (a gun) of a homicide investigator is stolen. He offers his resignation to his boss, for he wants to become a private detective in order to recover his gun. Instead, his boss assigns him as an assistant to a senior homicide detective. Together they will try to find the thief and get the pistol back.'Stray Dog' is an outstanding picture of the Americanized Japanese society after WW II with its baseball and its nightclubs. It is a society split between the wealthy few (also the black marketeers) and the many poor. The majority of the population is struggling to live decently. Both the thief and the homicide detective are war veterans, whose luggage was stolen on their way back home. But, they chose diametrically opposite 'professions'.A must for all Akira Kurosawa fans.

Charles Herold (cherold) This police procedural has the interesting premise of a cop obsessed with finding his stolen gun, and his sense of responsibility for everything that happens because of the theft. It's an interesting idea, a sort of cop version of Bicycle Thieves, but it's a bit slow and static. For all the comments here that call it a film noir, it lacks that sort of intensity, although it does have interesting anti-noir qualities - much of it takes place in daylight among people wearing light colored clothes.Even at its weakest, there are interesting Kurosawa touches throughout, most notably the use of the oppressive summer heat as a character in the film. And while some moments feel overlong, such as the cop's undercover work, there are nice bits like his dogging a suspect or that suspect's later interrogation by an older and wiser cop.The movie hits high Kurosawa in its fantastic forth. From a stunning image of a girl twirling in a dress just as a thunderstorm breaks,the film is everything you expect from the great director, as though a more experienced Kurosawa had jumped into a time machine to do the last part, and the final confrontation is brilliant, even if the movie's last short scene is as flat and dry as the first ones.Kurosawa has made much better movies, but there is enough of interest in this one that fans of the director should check it out at some point.

Kong Ho Meng This would be probably my least favourite of all kurosawa films because I believed Kurosawa at that point still had a lot to learn on how to make a really good detective drama -- though it is understandably about a rookie detective who has no clear idea of how to conduct his job properly (chasing after an armed criminal without backup is one example), I cannot accept that even with the whole experienced police force around there is such a lack of seriousness and professionalism in their conduct, also the logic of Takashi's deduction methods was totally unexplainable.There is also a severe lack of focus on the villain ...but this is forgivable as the film is made from the detectives' point of view and the subject matter of the film is actually the rookie himself. Mifune's dummy acting is probably the weakest one I have seen so far. However the strength of this film lies not in the characters nor plot, but it is the setting that has nothing to do with the story. I found myself more fascinated by the music and the environment in the background, especially during certain prolonged scenes of 'investigation'...which gave some idea of a real life post-war japan. It ended up looking more like a documentary in the end, and didn't work for me.Domo gomenasai, kurosawa-sama!

ducdebrabant I wish everybody who thinks owning a handgun is unqualified as a right and trivial as a responsibility would watch this film, in which Toshiro Mifune, a cop, gets his Colt stolen on a streetcar and spends the rest of the movie trying to get it back. First it falls into the hands of an illicit gun dealer who rents it out (in return for a ration card) for a crime that a first-time criminal doesn't have the nerve to commit. When the dealer is busted and the gun fortuitously remains in the hands of the failed criminal, a robbery is committed with it, and then a robbery/murder. Turns out the criminal is of the same generation as Mifune, a veteran like Mifune, and they have simply taken different paths in the squalor and chaos (meticulously depicted) of postwar Japan.Mifune ends up seconding a wily veteran cop on the case (Takashi Shimura, who played Mifune's doctor/mentor in the star's first film for Kurosawa, "Drunken Angel"), and a series of mounting climaxes follows. The entire story happens to take place in the middle of a cruel and universally demoralizing heat wave, punctuated at times by heavy but ineffectual rainstorms.Has there ever been a more charismatic movie star than Mifune? First of all, he's beautiful here, in the almost gaunt style of the very early Gregory Peck, but he also has the idiomatic look of a samurai on a painted screen, his features uncannily reproducing a classical style of art, and his eyebrows arching in a way we've seen a thousand times in art but rarely in life.And his acting is so laceratingly felt and real. This is one of those times when a sensibility profoundly Japanese (the young cop's sense of personal responsibility and shame) figures in a Kurosawa film, and yet we westerners are able to identify strongly with it -- even as Shimura and the partners' superiors act as voices of reason and experience, and tell Mifune at every turn that it's useless, no matter what the circumstances, to blame anyone but the fugitive.The gun had seven bullets when it was stolen, and the movie makes Mifune (and us) conscious of the remaining number after each occasion the gun is used. The breathless climax of the film -- a chase and a final duel -- begins with three bullets still in the shooter's clip and Mifune unarmed. Kurosawa makes us feel something for everybody. A hardened female pickpocket turns out to have a humane side. A gun-dealer's moll basically has the mind of a child, and Shimura is able to ingratiate himself with a judicious use of popsicles and cigarettes. The first victim (whom we never meet) is a woman whose dowry is stolen after she has waited 10 years to accumulate enough to marry. The second victim is a beautiful newlywed, whose devastated husband then smashes her tomato plants for the offense of being alive, and ripe.And by the time we meet the shooter, we feel we know him. We never do hear him speak, but all through the last few climactic minutes we are in both his head and Mifune's. The whole movie has been spiritually and physically oppressive on all the characters, and the final sequence literally exhausts the pursuer, the pursued, and the audience. Then there comes a quiet epilogue between the two cops in a hospital room, to let us collect ourselves. What a good movie!