Akira Kurosawa: the ten essentials

Ten films by the director who made samurai stories into world cinema and whose style influenced Westerns, war films and science fiction.

They mix his period films and his modern dramas, to show a filmmaker as comfortable with a crowded battlefield as with a quiet room.

It starts with Rashomon, the film that opened Western eyes to Japan, and moves through his great run of the 1950s and 1960s.

It closes with the late colour epics Kagemusha and Ran, built on a lifetime of craft.