For his birthday week, we here at MovieJawn are celebrating the work of Akira Kurosawa! Check out all of the pieces here. Ian kicks us off with a starter pack!

Welcome to How to Start Watching, in which our staff will recommend movies that will help you start watching a particular genre, director, film movement, etc. It’s a list of movies, but with a purpose that isn’t recounting the best or even favorites. Each entry will suggest a few films that will help you find a way into more movies! A starter pack, if you will.

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

One of the beautiful things about Akira Kurosawa’s filmography is that there is no wrong place to start. There are no duds. And while every film he made is worth a look, this list should get you fully indoctrinated as a Kurosawa obsessive. There is a universality to Kurosawa’s work that makes his films not only incredibly accessible, but inspired filmmakers in the West in a big way (Seven Samurai was adapted into The Magnificent Seven, Yojimbo was adapted into A Fistful of Dollars, and The Hidden Fortress’s influence on Star Wars is well known). It bears repeating that Kurosawa’s complete filmography is worth a look because he’s one of the few directors whose entire catalog deserves to be absorbed. There’s no bad place to start, but I have sequenced this list like a mixtape because the college radio DJ that lives inside of me cannot stop itself from doing this whenever given the chance:

1. Yojimbo (1961)

Look, we’ll get to Seven Samurai. I promise. It’s just hard to think of a more accessible entry point to Kurosawa than Yojimbo. Toshiro Mifune–a recurring theme in Kurosawa’s filmography and, naturally, this list–plays a ronin caught between two warring factions and plays them off one another. The film functions like an American Western transposed into feudal Japan, and the concise filmmaking and storytelling makes for a perfect entryway into Kurosawa’s filmography. Yojimbo’s sequel Sanjuro (1962) is also essential viewing, and features one of the all time great arterial spray sequences.

2. Rashomon (1950)

Kurosawa’s tale of a crime told from five different perspectives is a masterclass of storytelling. There is a reason the film has been parodied countless time and even inspired the term “The Rashomon Effect” to describe a story featuring multiple witnesses, all telling a different version of events. Yet in the West where we expect these sort of stories to resolve into some sort of true version of events so we can sit back and be like, “ohhhhh, it was the butler all along!” or whatever, Kurosawa does no such thing. He gives us five unreliable narrators–including a ghost!–and shows us that the truth can be more complicated than you think. 

3. Seven Samurai (1954)

Here it is, one of cinema’s undisputed masterpieces. An undisputed Top 5 pick in the conversation of Greatest Films of All Time. And yet I don’t recommend starting with it because it’s a whole hell of a lot of movie that is best appreciated with a little Kurosawa already under your belt. Maybe that’s a controversial opinion, but already having some experience with Kurosawa’s style–and Toshiro Mifune’s unbridled charisma–via Yojimbo and Rashomon is a perfect primer to this cinematic feat. Like Yojimbo and Rashomon, the story of Seven Samurai has been cribbed by so many movies and TV episodes that it’s hard to keep track (The Mandalorian is the latest to bust out a Seven Samurai episode). And there’s a good reason for that: it’s just a damn good story. A village is constantly under attack by bandits. They hire a down-on-his--luck samurai (Mifune) to protect them. He recruits six more samurai and trains the villagers to defend themselves. The bandits come and one of cinema’s great battle sequences ensues. Though that seems pretty straightforward for a 3-and-a-half hour epic, there is enough character development and depth of story for 5 movies. 

4, High and Low (1963)

Though Kurosawa is the master of the samurai film, it’s easy to overlook his non-samurai films which are just as essential. The shift from feudal Japanese samurai flick to police procedural is a jarring one, but Kurosawa’s ability to deftly tell these different types of stories at the same sky high level is just another reason why Kurosawa is in that unparalleled class of all-time masters. High and Low tells the story of a shoe company executive who is contacted by men who claim to have kidnapped his son and are holding him for ransom. But when his son walks in the door, he realizes the kidnappers goofed and kidnapped his driver’s son instead. And thus a true film noir morality tale ensues: does he leverage his position in the company to pay someone else’s kid’s ransom? Kurosawa had dabbled in noir before with Stray Dog (1949) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960)–both, naturally, were shortlisted for this list–but High and Low is in a class of its own. 

5. Ran (1985)

Kurosawa’s transpositions of Shakespeare to feudal Japan (see also: Throne of Blood, which adapts Macbeth) are a treat, and Ran is the borderline definitive cinematic rendition of King Lear. Where almost all of Kurosawa’s filmmaking is associated with his use of black and white photography, Ran gives us a look at what Kurosawa could do with the color spectrum and...you know what I’m gonna say right? He mastered color the way he mastered every other aspect of filmmaking he tried his hand at. Ran is Kurosawa’s final epic, and it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Yojimbo when you’re talking about Kurosawa’s greatest films. Where many great directors wane in their latter days, Kurosawa fully unlocked God Mode in his.

6. Ikiru (1952)

It’s hard to think of another film in Kurosawa’s filmography further than the samurai pictures he is best known for than Ikiru. Ikiru tells the story of a bureaucrat diagnosed with terminal cancer who is forced to reckon with his life. It’s one of the best films that tackles “the meaning of life.” For some reason I always thought this was one of Kurosawa’s final films, likely because Kurosawa so exquisitely ponders the questions one faces in their final years, and yet Ikiru preceded nearly all of the films we regard as Seminal Kurosawa (with the exception of Rashomon). I have a short list in my head of films that have made me openly weep, and Ikiru is on it. 

7. Dreams (1990)

Any list of MUST WATCH Kurosawa can recommend the Hidden Fortress, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, etc, and trust me if you love the films on this list you will get to those, but Dreams is Kurosawa’s final masterpiece and offers a fascinating look inside the head of one of cinema’s great geniuses. Quite literally in this case in which Kurosawa adapts his own dreams. The one that always sticks with me is where the protagonist encounters Vincent Van Gogh (played by, of all people, Martin Scorsese) painting in a field. The sequence later finds the character inside of Van Gogh’s paintings, moving through that impressionistic world. Though Kurosawa directed two more features before his death in 1998, Dreams is his final masterpiece, and a perfect coda to the life and career of one of cinema’s undisputed greats.