The (last) samurai of cinema

One of my favourite film directors in the world is the japanese Akira Kurosawa. 

Kurosawa was descendant from a samurai lineage, and this influenced in the stories of his most famous films, like Ran, Throne of blood or Seven Samurais.

Kurosawa began his career during the world war II, in the japanese empire, so his first movies were propagandistic movies. In the 50's Kurosawa began to be known in the West because his film Rashomon, because he won the best foreign film oscar with this movie.

The themes of Kurosawa's films are the human tragedies like war, poverty, greed. His characters aren't heroes, in many cases they are victims of the fate or victims of his own acts. Is for that I like Kurosawa's movies, because the stories he tells aren't stories of good and evil, are stories with contradictories characters, or maybe more realistic characters.    

He adapted books of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

The main character in most of the Kurosawa's films was played by Toshiro Mifune, actor that worked in 16 of his films, turned by kurosawa in the iconic image of a samurai.