The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

In cinema, a director’s control can show up in oppositional ways. For some, it’s exactly what you’d expect: a clear, hands-on influence over every part of a film, visible in the final result. For others, it’s a kind of intentional absence that still leaves its mark.

The former is epitomized in the work of Akira Kurosawa, whose films are the subject of a partial retrospective at the Music Box Theatre. This weekend I saw two of them: The Hidden Fortress (1958), a major influence on the original Star Wars (1977), and Sanjuro (1962), a sequel to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). I should be embarrassed that I hadn’t seen either film, but as I’ve discuss

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