Watching Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Ran" has been an experience. His movies are never what you expect and his endings never happy. His uniqueness, at least in my eye, is his ability to decentralize the movie over several characters that is in direct opposition to the Hollywood style of a single protagonist.
See his wikipedia entry for more on this master director. He easily ranks amongst of the top of my panthenon of directors that include Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick.
Red Beard and Yojimbo come highly recommended as movies to watch. Next on my list of Akira Kurosawa's classics is Rashomon. Once I'm doing watching his movies (see list below), I shall move on to accomplishing my ultimate movie watching goal; simply to watch all of
Wikipedia's Top 100 movies of all time
? Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
? The Most Beautiful (1944)
? Sanshiro Sugata Part II aka Judo Saga 2 (1945)
? The Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail (1945)
? No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
? One Wonderful Sunday (1946)
? Drunken Angel (1948)
? The Quiet Duel (1949)
? Stray Dog (1949)
? Scandal (1950)
? Rashomon (1950)
? The Idiot (1951)
? Ikiru aka To Live (1952)
? The Seven Samurai (1954)
? Record of a Living Being aka I Live in Fear (1955)
? The Throne of Blood aka Spider Web Castle (1957)
? The Lower Depths (1957)
? The Hidden Fortress (1958)
? The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
? Yojimbo aka The Bodyguard (1961)
? Sanjuro (1962)
? High and Low aka Heaven and Hell (1963)
? Red Beard (1965)
? Dodesukaden (1970)
? Dersu Uzala (1975)
? Kagemusha aka Shadow Warrior (1980)
? Ran (1985)
? Dreams aka Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)
? Rhapsody in August (1991)
? Madadayo aka Not Yet (1993)
