Seven Samurai
<PERSON> most popular and celebrated film, Seven Samurai, is one of those paradigm-shifting movies that's been imitated so much over the years that the source material is starting to lose a bit of its shine (through no fault of its own). I've seen this film several times over the years and it gets a little less impressive each time I watch it. Where the film excels is in the slow but steady execution of its nearly feel-good plot -- a poor village besieged by bandits seeks out the help of samurai to help them defend their village from a future attack. We get to know the samurai, their wannabes, and the villagers. <PERSON>'s camerawork is not as beautiful here as elsewhere, but it's extremely efficient and practical. 217
There's also quite a bit more humor in this than I remembered, particularly from <PERSON> <PERSON> samurai-wannabe character. And while the end is a little more complicated than just a simple "happy ending," it more or less ends where you expect it to. As a precursor to the modern action movie or revisionist Western, Seven Samurai holds up exceptionally well. But where best examples of those movies often excel because of their tenuous relationship with reality and basic physics, Seven Samurai actually falters--and falters very slightly--because it hews perhaps a little to close to reality (despite the 16th Century setting), playing a bit more like a costume drama than something <PERSON> or <PERSON>'s other scores of acolytes would slap together. These criticisms aside, <PERSON>'s greatness is on full display here, but his greatness has aged a bit better in some of his other handful of masterpieces. 698