"I’m going for a bit film school-y one, because I love Akira Kurosawa films, but I don’t want to go for Seven Samurai, so i’ll go for Yojimbo or Sanjuro, those ones that all the spaghetti westerns were based on. I know it’s not fair, but that clump of Japanese samurai films were just beautiful films. Toshiro Mifune was such an elegant hero and there’s something really empathetic about him. There’s this lovely thing with his face where you really can just tell everything that he’s thinking. He doesn’t have to do much at all; you can just sense what’s going on with him. So I love those films, anything with Mifune in actually, but that period in particular, he was the best hero ever."

"A completely different kind of samurai film. Actually, it’s a French gangster movie. It’s clear that director Jean-Pierre Melville digs old American gangster movies and filters that affection into creating his own unique genre. This is my favorite of his films. I first saw this baby when it was rereleased in theaters a few years ago, and was completely entranced."

"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."

"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."

"When I was fifteen, I caught a portion of Throne of Blood on television and couldn’t get it out of my mind. It set me off on a quest through video store shelves to figure out what it was I had seen, and I began by watching both Kagemusha and Seven Samurai on my way to finally rediscovering Throne of Blood. This pretty much sparked my interest in the classics. I cheated on this list by choosing three films, but I think it’s difficult to ever recommend just one Kurosawa film. Here’s a little side story: I used to encourage my friends to watch older movies back in high school, but they mostly found them to be dreadfully boring. The night before we were leaving for a snowboarding trip, I suggested watching a little bit of Seven Samurai. Now mind you, these are dudes who pretty much only watched the latest action movies or comedies. By the time intermission(!) came up, everyone had decided they needed to see the rest of this nearly four-hour epic instead of snowboarding in the morning. I highly recommend Seven Samurai for the reluctant classic movie watcher. It might just change some lives, but it can certainly change people’s perceptions of older films and remind them that “classic cinema” simply refers to old movies that are so awesome they’ve stood the test of time."