After The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu won prizes in successive Venice Film Festivals in the early '50s, Mizoguchi became an icon for the nascent French New Wave. His mastery of mise-en-scène was lauded by Jacques Rivette, while Jean-Luc Godard praised his metaphysics and his stylistic elegance, at the same time deriding Akira Kurosawa as a second-rate talent. (allmoive 搵出黎)