A stunning accomplishment, that has impacted a wide range of cinema. Amazingly distinct characters for such a large cast.
Seven Samurai (七人の侍)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Japan
- 1954
- · 207m
Director
Akira Kurosawa
Cast
Toshirō Mifune,
Takashi Shimura,
Yoshio Inaba,
Seiji Miyaguchi,
Minoru Chiaki,
Daisuke Katô
Genre
Action,
Drama
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs shelter from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and, in return, the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
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What are users saying?
Imitation is the purest form of flattery, and all action in films stems from one movie: Seven Samurai.
the modern action film basically starts here, a cinematic monument
What are critics saying?
100
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The glorious vigour and strength of this film is presented with such theatrical relish and flair: its energy flashes out of the screen like a sword.
100
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.
100
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
The legendary Mifune leads a superb cast, and Kurosawa's kinetic camera keeps the adventure sizzling with energy and wit from start to finish.
100
TV Guide Magazine
Much imitated, still unsurpassed. By critical consensus one of the best movies ever made, The Seven Samurai covers so much emotional, historical, and cinematic ground that that it demands to be viewed over and over again.
100
Boston Globe by Ty Burr
Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.
90
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
On that simple framework and familiar story line, director Kurosawa has plastered a wealth of rich detail, which brilliantly illuminates his characters and the kind of action in which they are involved. He has loaded his film with unusual and exciting physical incidents and made the whole thing graphic in a hard, realistic western style.
90
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.
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