bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

sponsorType

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

Associated Press

Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. But despite its age, the vitality and fleet-footed movement of Kurosawa’s epic is still breathtaking.
To watch it again is to be swept along, all over again, by its flowing action and breadth of vision.
Seven Samurai moves just as swiftly as Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), the noble samurai leader of the seven, sprints this way and that in the climactic battle, the film flying through rice fields and down wooded pathways.
Kurosawa’s camera does not anticipate where the action is running so much as chase headlong after it.


For many of its admirers, Seven Samurai has likewise been a kind of pursuit. It is not that Kurosawa’s movie is so elusive – it is a fairly straightforward tale that states its meaning plainly.
Its mystery is more the kind reserved for a grand monument whose existence seems as unfathomable as it is undeniable.

The film, a 207-minute epic about a 16th-century farm community that turns to a band of samurai to defend itself from marauding bandits, has seemed to always be here. It is about as lodged in movie canon as is possible.
Any beginner list for world cinema probably includes it. In British magazine Sight and Sound’s decennial The Greatest Films of All Time poll of critics and filmmakers, it has slid slightly but not much.
In 2022, it ranked No 20, fittingly right alongside Apocalypse Now, whose director, Francis Ford Coppola, is one of Kurosawa’s most devoted acolytes.
No one has come near it
American film critic Pauline Kael, on Seven Samurai
Coppola and his contemporaries, including Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, worshipped Kurosawa. Scorsese once described “the shock of that level of mastery” when he encountered Kurosawa’s movies in the 1950s.
Later generations of filmmakers have had similar reactions. Alexander Payne called Seven Samurai a thunderbolt that changed his life. After seeing it as a young man, he said to himself: “I will never climb a mountain that high but I want to be on that mountain.”
“No one has come near it,” American film critic Pauline Kael wrote years ago – a judgment that still holds.
Affection, of course, is not universal for Seven Samurai. Kurosawa’s appeal in the West has always been in part because he, himself, was steeped in Hollywood genre films. The director, who made Seven Samurai after the masterworks Rashomon (1950) and Ikiru (1952), was influenced by John Ford’s films.

Westerns, in turn, took after Kurosawa’s masterpiece, beginning with the 1960 John Sturges remake The Magnificent Seven, a film that took the American title from the initial US release of Seven Samurai, for which Japanese production and distribution company Toho Studios cut 50 minutes.
The enduring influence of Seven Samurai can be seen everywhere from the sideways wipe transitions of Star Wars to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.
And, given how many movies since have taken more superficial approaches to its band-of-warriors-assemble narrative, a pessimistic view of Seven Samurai could lament it as a forerunner to today’s spectacle-first big-budget movies.
Shot in 148 days spread out over an entire year, Seven Samurai was at its time the most expensive Japanese film ever made, and one of the most popular domestically.
But Seven Samurai should not have to pay for its paler imitations. Watching Kurosawa’s masterpiece again, it is startling just how much it remains in a class by itself.
One could point to particular elements – the choreography, the rain, the actor Toshiro Mifune – but it goes deeper than the vast sum of its many parts.

When Kurosawa decided to make what would be his first samurai film, Japan was just emerging from post-war American occupation. The samurai genre had gone somewhat dormant during that period, and Seven Samurai would help re-establish it.
But Kurosawa’s film, which was written by him with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni after a lengthy period of research, juggles themes of individualism and sacrifice for the common good that resonated in post-war Japan.
Seven Samurai is closer to movie myth than local legend. Its ultimate battle is not between the samurai-assisted villagers and the bandits but lies in the tension between the samurai and the villagers, who anxiously hide their women from the hired warriors and who, in the end, celebrate a victory different than that of the samurai.
“In the end, we lost this battle, too,” a surviving samurai says.
Seven Samurai, at once hopeful and tragic, is less about a battle of good versus evil than it is a timeless soldier truth. The samurai do not, as the villagers do, return to normal life.
And for those that perish face down in the mud – moments that Kurosawa pauses to linger on, and a perspective Michael Mann would later adopt for the deaths in Heat – destiny is particularly cruel.
In this eternally kinetic film, its moments of stillness are often the most profound.


Netflix’s Beyond Goodbye stars Kasumi Arimura and Kentaro Sakaguchi on the Japanese drama

Hong Kong Asian Film Festival 2024: 10 of the best movies to see, including The Last Dance

Japan’s sento bathhouses, featured in Perfect Days, are appealing to a younger clientele – but how do they differ from onsen?

Surveillance in Singapore, Japan and a Trump-led US tackled in films at Venice festival

Asian cinema: Japanese films

Seven Samurai at 70: why Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s epic is still breathtaking

Toshiro Mifune in a still from Seven Samurai. Photo: Janus Films via AP

Toshiro Mifune in a still from Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa’s epic is considered one of the greatest movies ever made, but what makes it still so good 70 years after it was released? Photo: Janus Films via AP

 A still from Seven Samurai. Photo: Janus Films via AP

Takashi Shimura in a still from Seven Samurai. Photo: Janus Films via AP

Toshiro Mifune in a still from Seven Samurai, the most expensive Japanese ever made at the time. Photo: Janus Films via AP

From Her to Spirited Away, the 5 top films of French-American entrepreneur Camille Glass

Taika Waititi and Roman Griffin Davis in a still from Jojo Rabbit. Photo: Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

French American entrepreneur Camille Glass shares her top 5 favourite films with the Post. Photo: Edmond So

Cecilia Cheung: Hong Kong actress, sex scandal victim and Chinese social media star

Cecilia Cheung at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004. The actress’ personal life garnered a lot of attention in the 2000s, with tabloids covering scandals and her high-profile romantic life. Photo: SCMP

Cheung in 1999. Photo: Oliver Tsang

Cheung speaks after receiving the award for best new performer, as veteran actors Liza Wang and Danny Lee look on, at the 19th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2000. Photo: Martin Chan

Cheung and Nicholas Tse in 2001. Photo: Reuters

Cheung in a still from Lost in Time (2003), for which she won best actress at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards. Photo: China Star Entertainment Group

Cheung and Tse at the 30th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2011, the year they filed for divorce. Photo: K. Y. Cheng

Cheung and Stephen Chow in a still from King of Comedy (1999). Her feature-film debut remains one of her most memorable roles. Photo: The Star Overseas

Cheung and her three sons. Photo: Weibo

Cheung in a photo she posted on her Weibo account in 2023. Photo: Weibo

Customs Frontline’s Nicholas Tse on adding action director to his CV and his ‘real’ stunts

Nicholas Tse at the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. Photo: Alice BL Durigatto.

Nicholas Tse in a still from Customs Frontline. The Hong Kong actor, who got his first action director credit for his work on the Herman Yau movie, tells the Post how he engineered stunts in a “traditional” way to make “a true action film”.

Nicholas Tse on the set of Customs Frontline filming a stunt involving a shipping container.

Nicholas Tse slides from the container onto a car on the set of Customs Frontline.

Tse performs a stunt on the set of Customs Frontline.

Tse (front) and German Cheung Man-kit in a still from Raging Fire.

Nicholas Tse (front) and Jacky Cheung in a still from Customs Frontline.

Tse (left) and Jackie Chan in a still from New Police Story (2004).

Tse (left) and director Herman Yau at the 2024 Far East Film Festival. Photo: Alice BL Durigatto

Nicholas Tse in an interview with the Post at the Far East Film Festival.

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Culture

Film & TV

Japanese director’s film influenced Star Wars and left Martin Scorsese ‘shocked’. So what makes it one of the greatest movies ever made?


Japanese director’s 1954 epic has influenced American filmmakers from Scorsese to Coppola and is considered among the greatest movies ever made. What is it that makes the film so special?


Cinema

Japan

United States

American cinema