Having taken the feudal samurai epic to its logical color-drenched conclusions in Kagemusha and Ran, Kurosawa retreated (or advanced) to a far more intimate vision with this collection of eight brightly colored short tales inspired not by historical sagas, but by individual dreams. “A human is a genius while dreaming. Fearless and brave, like a genius,” Kurosawa stated. The dreams may reference folk tales or spirits, past or future, art or utopia, but all are filmed in the director's late-career trademark style of “moving paintings,” each scene concerned not with replicating reality, but with enhancing it. The cast includes many Kurosawa collaborators, as well as Ozu regular Chishu Ryu and even Martin Scorsese, who plays Vincent Van Gogh. A highly personal dismissal of commercial considerations and genre appeal, Dreams is the statement of an artist continuing to experiment, and astonish.