A new 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece, SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), starring the legendary Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, will run at Film Forum from Friday, July 5 through Thursday, July 18.
In 16th century Japan, as proud samurai end up as masterless, wandering ronin and farmers are prostrate under the heel of marauding bandits, a village patriarch counsels resistance. How? Hire samurai, “hungry samurai.” Under the calm leadership of Takashi Shimura (Kurosawa regular, star of Ikiru and Godzilla), that magic number enlist for a war against 40 mounted bandits, winding up at the most hair-raising battle ever filmed.
Kurosawa’s orchestration of swords, spears, arrows, men, horses, rain, wind, and mud; blazing tracking shots; giant close ups; chiaroscuro lighting; telephoto lenses that put us underfoot as horses crash amid struggling men; deep focus shots that render the tip of a sword poking into the lens equally clear with scurrying figures fifty feet away, transitions that effortlessly whip us from scene to scene; and ensemble performances that give dimensionality to every character, topped by Toshiro Mifune’s eventual transition from manic goofball to tortured, self-hating tragic hero make SEVEN SAMURAI one of the most influential films of all time.
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