How many samurai movies

The story of the downtrodden turning to unlikely heroes is a formula that seems to have universal appeal. Specifically, with Seven Samurai, its grandiose, human approach to the material has inspired dozens of other films, remakes, and more. Watch if: You want to see what might just be the best samurai movie of all time. Avoid if: You prefer fight scenes that are more stylized. Is it cheating to allow for the inclusion of a trilogy on this best samurai movies list?

It is indeed three films, but it is meant to be appreciated as one compulsory, almost overwhelming experience. The visual poetry of this film has been another big inspiration for the many things to come out after it.

Watch if: You want to see one of the best in the long career of Toshiro Mifune, one of the finest actors of his time. Throne of Blood is quite possibly the finest marriage of Shakespeare with feudal Japan. It is yet another extraordinary collaboration between Toshiro Mifune, playing essentially Macbeth, and Akira Kurosawa, who was no stranger to using outside influences to tell decidedly Japanese stories.

Throne of Blood is perhaps best appreciated in the present for two things. The first would be the performances, particularly Mifune in one of his most complex, compelling roles. The second involves a stunning scene that brings together Mifune with what seems like a few hundred thousand arrows. Just keep in mind that while that scene is unforgettable, everything else leading up to that moment is why that scene is unforgettable in the first place.

Avoid if: You prefer more straightforward Shakespearean adaptations. God knows why, but you do. It is even more impressive when you consider the variety in the stories they told together. Yojimbo is considerably more lighthearted than anything else they ever did. Between Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, it can be easy to lose sight of the many other contributions to these examples of cinema at its very best.

Watch if: You want to see a dark horse hero who is about as cool as it gets at the movies. A deeply effecting mediation on hypocrisy, the madness of a code, and similar subjects, Harakiri is one of the most emotionally devastating entries on this list. While this high drama by director Masaki Kobayashi has some memorable fight scenes, particularly close to the end, this is more of a human story than anything else.

That is a consistency among most of the best samurai films. It is fascinating to see the various types of character studies that have emerged through the decades. Watch if: You want to see one of the most compelling dramas in samurai film history. Avoid if: Your preference runs to happy endings. In which case, you might be in the wrong genre. Just one year after the success of Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa teamed up again to take the character into a darker territory.

The result is Mifune playing the character with a little less aloofness, in a story in which Sanjuro assists a group of young men who are trying to obliterate corruption from their clan. Make no mistake: This is still fairly lighthearted. This time, as humorous and engaging as the movie can be, the cynicism is a little more noticeable.

Watch if: You want to see one of the best sequels of all time. The first in a long series of successful films from Dalei Studios, The Tale of Zatoichi accomplishes two things. It is a wonderful introduction to Zatoichi, played here and for the course of this film series by the immensely talented Shintaro Katsu.

Katsu created an appealing hero for a series of films that were consistently filled with adventure, and had the flexibility to occasionally dive into darker realms of storytelling.

Avoid if: You want your samurai movies to be as stern and grim as possible. Running minutes, this is another entry on the list that will demand a lot of your time.

Samurai narratives lend themselves well to epic film storytelling. It is also a visionary example of combining brutal, brilliant action pieces with deep depictions of the human spirit in all its complexities. This film is an overwhelming experience in the best way possible. Watch if: You want to see one of the finest film versions of the 47 Ronin tale. Avoid if: Again, this might be a challenging choice, if your movie picks rarely run longer than minutes.

A prequel film for a popular TV series, Hideo Gosha made a ferocious feature film debut that has since come to be regarded as one of the most enjoyable and accessible samurai movies of all time. Three Outlaw Samurai benefits from great characters, particularly the three titular outlaws.

At the same time, the movie also keeps the action moving with one of the most exhilarating chanbara sword-fighting movies ever made. Three Outlaw Samurai is also a striking example of samurai movies which deal with the way these individuals struggled to maintain their identities and titles in a world of utter chaos.

Avoid if: You prefer samurai movies that delve into human interest stories. Directed by the fascinating Kihachi Okamoto, The Sword of Doom is one of the great showcases for Tatsuya Nakadai, who is no stranger to list of great samurai movies at this point.

A samurai of questionable morals, Ryunosuke Tsukue is compelling but insufferable, when we first meet him. However, if we can see this bastard of a man find purpose, then that will have to do in the way of hope.

Sword of Doom builds to that with heartbreaking, awestriking precision. It also features one of the most violent, breathless conclusions to be found on this list. Watch if: You like stories about real assholes.

Alain Delon was one of the great detached, cool, and very French leading men of his period. Passion and pride run against his better judgments, which dictates much of this story.

It also draws further comparisons to samurai stories, or at least to the ideals of the men and women in those stories. Watch if: You want to watch a grim French noir with interesting roots.

When a sadistic warlord threatens to undo a hard-won peace in feudal Japan, a group of rogue samurai must team up to cut him — and his army — down in bloody swathes. What starts out as a sombre, beautifully filmed historical drama eventually descends into pure spectacle with an all-hell-breaks-loose finale that must be seen to be believed.

With major talent both in front of and behind the camera, this is a film that has its blood-soaked cake and devours it whole. Rurouni Kenshin is a manga and anime about a reformed samurai that gained popularity both in and outside its home country in the s. In addition to the animated adaptation, it spawned a live-action version in , which proved so popular that it got two sequels. In the first movie, set during the Meiji restoration, a former assassin makes a vow never to take another life and devotes his existence to wandering the land, helping others.

His noble ways, though, are soon put to the test as he comes up against merciless killers. With great fight choreography and a fresh-faced cast, the movie perfectly captures the spirit of the source material, with its themes of atonement, the desire for inner peace and what it means to help others. This set-up makes for perfect Miike fare, with one gore-soaked encounter after another.

This article is an updated version of a story created by Wing Yan Chan. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements.

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Yufuin Kutsurogi no Yado Nanakawa. Action junkies get to watch riveting combat with cool-looking swords. It is with solemn bushido reverence that I invite you to join us as we dive into 50 films that exemplify this mightiest of genres.

The Muromachi Period encompasses the bulk of the movies in this list, but this part deals with the handful that occur in earlier times, before the ceaseless age of war that followed.

For the purposes of our list, here are the films dealing with samurai before the rise of the shogun and the horrific century of bloody civil war that followed. This film was actually censored by U. The slim minute movie tells a story set in A. Kurosawa would go on to hammer out decade after decade of indelible film classics and indispensable samurai films.

Check out this short meditation to see how much he already knew 15 years before he even made Yojimbo. What does it mean to be a good man? Does it mean unwavering fealty to your lord and land, an indomitable will to carry out your duties despite risk to your own safety? Does it mean devotion to your wife, and loyalty to her above all others? What happens when the first man grows jealous of the second man?

All the same, he proves the better of the two by modern and even archaic definitions of manliness, while Morito proves himself to be something of a monster in spite of his martial virtues. What you get out of Rashomon likely reflects what you bring into it, but it might help to bring a basic grasp of cubism to the proceedings. The bandit, the man accused of murdering a samurai and raping his wife?

The wife? The samurai himself, summoned to the trial via spirit medium? A system of violent, treacherous feudalism arose that created a sort of golden age of the samurai. Sengoku Jidai —this age of civil war—lasted a blood-soaked century and a half. Films set in this period feature massive armies clashing on horseback, devious clan warfare and intrigue, castles under siege, and earth-shattering historical epics written in noble blood. Toshiro Mifune stars as Washizu, a loyal samurai retainer driven to ambition and then ruin after receiving a prophecy from an evil spirit while wandering the aftermath of a decisive battle.

The stark black-and-white photography Kurosawa employs here, more even than his better-remembered samurai films like Yojimbo or The Seven Samurai , demonstrates how much care he puts into each shot, whether it requires the exact timing and coordination of hundreds of extras, intricate blocking as a single character succumbs to madness or despair, or framing a motionless evil spirit leering menacingly in the midst of a fog-shrouded forest.

Throne of Blood is the rare film that can function as both a love letter to its source material and a unique work of art in its own right. And it puts other, lazier adaptations of Shakespeare to shame, too.

Initially told from the point of view of two bumbling, quarrelsome civilians Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara who are lured into the thick of a war zone by the promise of gold, the story soon finds them running afoul of two opposing clans.

And, like its cinematic successor, it ends with a triumph, though a small one, that promises the good guys will fight on. Based on a ferocious rivalry between two larger-than-life historical samurai, Heaven and Earth is a lavish war movie. Portraying young samurai Kagetora Takaaki Enoki as an earnest nobleman seeking to protect his kingdom from the invading warlord Takeda Shingen Masahiko Tsugawa , the story follows the ups and downs of his leadership.

After the maneuvering, the treachery and the clash of armies, it all builds to exactly the inevitable showdown you hope it does: Two guys in head-to-toe armor with swords slugging it out on horseback in the middle of a shallow river.

Granted a last minute reprieve from joining his lord in death, he elects for a late life of earthly pleasures. He flatly states the chivalric samurai code of bushido is for fools when a family members demands he take his own life and end the embarrassment to his clan. Uchida was stranded in occupied Manchuria for nearly a decade following the Second World War, a time of his life about which little has been written. His pre-war work barely survives and by all accounts is filled with weird stylistic and political inconsistency.

This production, mounted with the aid of funding from George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, almost had as much drama behind the scenes as the sweeping Sengoku Jidai war epic that made it onto the celluloid.

When Shingen is mortally wounded in the course of his war for supremacy over Japan, he orders that his decoy take his place and his death be kept secret for three years for the good of the clan. It will end tragically, of course. That means accepting his fate as well. This film feels a bit like it was conceived by a child, but at least it was a kid with a very active imagination. A colorful, overlong minutes?!? This is a film that should be viewed either late at night with a bunch of whiskey or early in the morning with a bunch of sugar cereal.

After more than a century of ceaseless conflict, the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu finally outmaneuvered his rivals and seized power over all of Japan.

Naming himself shogun, Ieyasu and his heirs would hold dominion over Japan for nearly three centuries—longer, as of this writing, than the United States has been a sovereign country.

Ieyasu moved most of the government from Kyoto to Edo present-day Tokyo , and so this time in history is called the Edo or the Tokugawa period. With the sudden end of constant war, the samurai class slowly became unmoored. At the same time, Tokugawa declared that Japan would be largely closed to outsiders and that a person could not leave the social class into which he or she was born, facts that contributed to the feeling of society becoming static.

Films set in this period wallow in existential uncertainty and cloying social convention. A few of his contemporaries became icons, like Seijun Suzuki, Yosujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, who all broke free from their expectations as studio filmmakers to exercise a new creative freedom apart from tradition. They created their own traditions, building myths from the ruins of their reality.

And, in tune with the best chambara the decade had to offer, his fight is a spectacularly beautiful one. In case it bears mentioning: This is The 47 Ronin , not 47 Ronin. So, in other words, this is the template-shaping Kenji Mizoguchi movie, the movie that served and still serves as the basis for a samurai sub-genre, not the pre- John Wick Keanu Reeves flick that stank up theaters at the end of Sorry Keanu.

We love you lots, but lord above, that was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie. Basically, back in the 18th century in Japan, a company of samurai, left leaderless and disgraced when law compelled their lord to commit seppuku , decided to team up and get revenge for his death. Based on historical events, the story follows a young lord in the 18th Century who is killed due to court intrigue and his 47 samurai retainers stripped of their titles and made to be ronin.

The honorable thing to do in such cases is normally to just commit seppuku and join your lord in death. It is very slow, plodding, and the action comes seemingly from out of nowhere.