Kurosawa is my favorite Japanese - if not global - director/writer. I like to watch Seven Samurai every few years.

I'm drawn to the Miyamoto series. That for me is all that I need of the superhero genre. Rashomon, Sanjuro, Yojimbo are some others that I like to re-view occasionally. Dreams had several vignettes with superbly executed surprise twists.

There were several films with post-war settings that caught me, too. One of them - though I'm not sure that it was a Kurosawa film - was about a local bureaucracy where the head of a department tries to rediscover his humanity before he dies by standing up for building of a small park that the local citizens requested. He dies, and the other members of his department get drunk at his wake and promise to follow his example. Then the following workday they are back to reviewing documents and passing them to the next bureaucrat around the staff table, never accomplishing anything. Rather pessimistic, but the park does get built.

paul spencer