A beginner's guide to the films of Akira Kurosawa

For cinephiles exploring world cinema, few names carry the weight of Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese director reshaped how stories could be told on screen, blending feudal history, moral philosophy, and visual poetry in ways that still ripple through every film school syllabus in Melbourne and Sydney. His work sits alongside the classics of Australian cinema, influencing filmmakers from Peter Weir to the production design of Mad Max, and remains a touchstone for anyone interested in the moving image as art.

What makes Kurosawa so approachable for newcomers is the sheer variety of his filmography. Over four decades he made samurai dramas, contemporary thrillers, Shakespearean adaptations, and quiet meditations on mortality, all anchored by his belief in the dignity of ordinary people. Whether a viewer chooses a black-and-white masterpiece from the 1950s or a sweeping colour epic from the 1980s, the emotional core stays recognisable, which is why his films keep drawing fresh audiences in Brisbane cinemas and regional film societies.

The catalogue can feel overwhelming for a first-time viewer, partly because the pictures are referenced so often in popular culture. George Lucas borrowed the structure of The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and many Australian genre filmmakers have cited Kurosawa as a touchstone for action choreography. Starting with a few carefully chosen films makes the journey more rewarding, especially when paired with the kind of curated collections that specialty retailers like Sasquatch Video have long championed.

A life shaped by Tokyo and the silent era

Akira Kurosawa was born in 1910 in the Ōimachi district of Tokyo, the youngest of four brothers in a family that ran a boarding school. His father Isamu exposed the children to Western literature, theatre, and film, while his mother Shima encouraged a love of traditional Japanese art. These twin influences would later surface in pictures that move fluidly between Japanese custom and European storytelling.

As a young man Kurosawa answered an advertisement for assistant directors at Photo Chemical Laboratory, the studio that became Toho. He spent the late 1930s learning his craft, often watching silent comedies and Westerns to study pacing and physical performance. That grounding in silent-era cinema stayed with him: even his later talkies contain long, wordless passages where weather, gesture, and composition carry the meaning, a technique Australian audiences might recognise in the visual economy of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Foundational works every new viewer should see

The single best entry point is Rashomon, the 1950 film that introduced Kurosawa to international audiences and won the Golden Lion at Venice. Set in a ruined gatehouse during a civil war, four witnesses give contradictory accounts of a murder and a rape, and the film uses their stories to ask whether truth itself is reliable. Its influence stretches from cinematic modernism to the narrative experiments of contemporary Australian television drama.

Ikiru, made two years later, offers a very different emotional register. Watanabe, a Tokyo bureaucrat played by Takashi Shimura, learns he is dying and spends his final months trying to build a playground for neighbourhood children. The film is a tender study of regret, purpose, and the difference between merely existing and truly living, themes that resonate strongly with audiences at the Melbourne International Film Festival, where it has screened multiple times in restored prints. Together with Seven Samurai, these three pictures form the cornerstone of any worthwhile Kurosawa collection.

Samurai, weather, and the burden of honour

No guide to the director is complete without addressing his samurai films, the genre most associated with his name. Yojimbo and Sanjuro pair the charismatic ronin Miyamoto Musashi, played by the great Toshiro Mifune, against a backdrop of corruption, drought, and comic violence. These films are loud, funny, and surprisingly modern in their cynicism about authority.

Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth, relocates the Scottish play to a fog-shrouded medieval Japan, while Ran takes King Lear and reimagines it as a war between three ageing warlords in a landscape of burning fields and crumbling castles. Both films show how the director used weather as a moral force, a choice that influenced everything from Mad Max: Fury Road's desert storms to the rain-soaked showdowns of the Underbelly series. Viewers who love the operatic scope of Australian period productions will find a kindred spirit here.

Later years, colour, and the question of legacy

After a period of personal difficulty in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kurosawa returned with Dersu Uzala, a Russian co-production shot in Siberia that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The picture follows a Russian surveyor and his elderly Mongol guide, and it distils the director's recurring theme: the wisdom lost when industrial society overwrites older ways of life.

His final masterpieces, Kagemusha and Ran, demonstrated that a director in his seventies could still command vast resources and complex battle sequences. Dreams, released in 1990, is a more personal project, an anthology of eight vignettes drawn from the director's own recurring nightmares and fantasies. After his death in 1998, the Japanese government awarded him the Order of Culture, and retrospectives in venues like ACMI in Melbourne continue to draw curious new viewers.

Where to find Kurosawa films across Australia

Collectors and casual viewers have several good options when building a Kurosawa library. Specialist retailers such as Sasquatch Video stock hard-to-find editions, boxed sets, and restored prints that mainstream shops rarely carry, and gift certificates from the same company make a thoughtful present for film lovers in Perth, Adelaide, or anywhere else. In major cities, Palace Cinemas and Dendy Cinemas regularly programme retrospectives that include 4K restorations of the classic titles.

Streaming availability shifts frequently, but SBS and the Criterion Channel have both carried significant portions of the filmography at various times, often with English subtitles suitable for Australian home viewing. Public libraries in Sydney and Melbourne also maintain substantial world cinema sections, where titles like Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress can often be borrowed alongside home-grown Australian classics. For anyone willing to take the time, the rewards are lasting: a body of work that has shaped global cinema, and that still feels urgent, humane, and astonishingly beautiful.