Every Akira Kurosawa Film Ranked: The Essential Starter List

Akira Kurosawa directed 30 films across five decades, and the intimidating part isn't finding a good one. It's deciding where to start when the same filmography contains samurai battles, kidnapping thrillers, Shakespeare, postwar noir and one extremely strange movie about a trolley-obsessed boy.

His career ran from Sanshiro Sugata in 1943 to Madadayo in 1993, a 50-year span that changed what action movies, crime dramas and historical epics could look like. Here's how all 30 rank, with the films you should watch first sitting exactly where they belong.

The Top 10: Start Here

1. Seven Samurai (1954) Yes, it's about three and a half hours long. You'll stop caring once the village prepares for the bandits. Kurosawa turns a simple defence mission into an action template filmmakers have borrowed from ever since, while Toshiro Mifune gives Kikuchiyo enough rage, comedy and vulnerability to carry a movie by himself. Its budget was around $500,000, then the largest for a Japanese production.

2. High and Low (1963) A wealthy executive learns kidnappers have accidentally taken his chauffeur's son instead of his own. What follows is a vicious moral dilemma that gradually transforms into a police procedural. If black-and-white samurai movies aren't your thing, start here.

3. Ikiru (1952) A terminally ill bureaucrat decides to do something meaningful with the little time he has left. That premise could become unbearable in lesser hands. Kurosawa instead makes it funny, sad and quietly furious about institutions designed to prevent anyone from accomplishing anything.

4. Yojimbo (1961) Mifune walks into a town controlled by two rival gangs and decides to play them against each other. He's scruffy, opportunistic and enormously entertaining. Sergio Leone later reworked the basic setup for A Fistful of Dollars.

5. Rashomon (1950) One crime. Several incompatible accounts. At 88 minutes, Rashomon is one of the easiest entry points into Kurosawa, and its fractured storytelling remains so recognizable that the "Rashomon effect" became shorthand for contradictory perspectives.

6. Ran (1985) Kurosawa takes King Lear, moves it to feudal Japan and fills the screen with armies distinguished by blazing primary colours. Made when he was in his mid-70s, Ran feels less like an old director revisiting past glories than someone discovering what colour can do to tragedy.

7. Throne of Blood (1957) Another Shakespeare adaptation, this time Macbeth. Mifune's final encounter with a barrage of arrows remains terrifying because Kurosawa famously used real arrows, with professional archers firing around the actor.

8. Stray Dog (1949) A rookie detective loses his pistol on a sweltering Tokyo bus, then discovers it's being used to commit crimes. The result mixes police procedural, noir and a portrait of postwar Japan that practically sweats through the screen.

9. The Hidden Fortress (1958) A princess, a general and two bickering peasants attempt to cross hostile territory. George Lucas has openly discussed its influence on Star Wars, particularly Kurosawa's decision to view an epic conflict partly through two low-status characters.

10. Sanjuro (1962) The wandering swordsman from Yojimbo returns and gets stuck helping nine painfully earnest young samurai. It's lighter, quicker and funnier than its predecessor, right until one famously explosive burst of violence.

The Great Ones You Watch After You're Hooked

11. Red Beard (1965) is a three-hour medical drama about an arrogant young doctor learning humility, and it marked Mifune's final film with Kurosawa.

12. Drunken Angel (1948) gave Mifune his first major Kurosawa role, playing a tubercular gangster whose doctor is nearly as stubborn as he is.

13. The Bad Sleep Well (1960) turns corporate corruption into something close to Shakespearean revenge noir.

14. Kagemusha (1980) follows a thief hired to impersonate a dead warlord. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped secure backing for the production, which became Kurosawa's major return to large-scale samurai filmmaking.

15. Dersu Uzala (1975) swaps Japan for Siberia and follows the friendship between a Russian explorer and a Nanai hunter. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

16. The Lower Depths (1957) traps a collection of impoverished characters in a grim lodging house and lets Kurosawa's actors tear into Maxim Gorky's play.

17. No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) is one of his most explicitly political films, with Setsuko Hara playing a woman transformed by repression, war and loss.

18. One Wonderful Sunday (1947) follows a broke young couple trying to enjoy a day together in devastated postwar Tokyo.

19. I Live in Fear (1955) gives Mifune one of his strangest roles, playing an elderly industrialist terrified that nuclear war will destroy his family.

20. Dreams (1990) is uneven by design, moving through eight dreamlike episodes filled with fox weddings, peach orchards, nuclear terror and a memorable Vincent van Gogh sequence.

For Completionists, With Some Real Gems

21. Madadayo (1993) is Kurosawa's gentle farewell, centred on professor and writer Hyakken Uchida and the former students who continue celebrating him as he ages. It was the director's final film.

22. Dodes'ka-den (1970) was Kurosawa's first colour feature, following residents of a Tokyo slum through interconnected stories.

23. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) squeezes disguise, danger and class comedy into roughly an hour.

24. Sanshiro Sugata (1943) already contains flashes of the director Kurosawa would become. His 79-minute debut follows a young judo student learning that strength without discipline doesn't mean much.

25. The Idiot (1951) adapts Dostoevsky and suffers from studio cuts, but its damaged characters and wintry Hokkaido imagery still hit.

26. Scandal (1950) attacks tabloid journalism through the story of a painter and singer falsely presented as lovers.

27. Rhapsody in August (1991) examines the memory of Nagasaki through an elderly survivor and her grandchildren.

28. The Most Beautiful (1944) is an unmistakably wartime production about women working in an optics factory, interesting now partly because of the constraints surrounding its creation.

29. Sanshiro Sugata Part II (1945) revisits Kurosawa's judo hero but feels far more compromised by wartime propaganda than the original.

30. Song of the Horse (1970) sits awkwardly at the edge of the filmography because it's a television documentary rather than a conventional theatrical feature. If you're sticking to the standard 30-feature count used by the BFI, leave this aside and treat the theatrical canon as the main list.

Why You Should Care

You don't need to become a Japanese-cinema obsessive to see Kurosawa's fingerprints everywhere. Watch Seven Samurai and modern team-up action movies suddenly look familiar; watch High and Low and you'll recognise the DNA of decades of police thrillers.

Better still, his movies rarely feel like homework. Kurosawa understood movement, suspense and flawed people too well for that.

What to Watch Next

After Kurosawa, try Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) to see how Yojimbo travelled west. Then watch John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), Hollywood's direct reworking of Seven Samurai.

And finish with Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri (1962). It's colder and more openly furious about samurai mythology than Kurosawa's work, which makes it an excellent companion piece. Once you've watched both approaches, the old idea that classic Japanese cinema is difficult to get into becomes pretty hard to defend.