Wild how Akira Kurosawa can make one of the greatest and most influential films of all time, a formally, thematically, and emotionally rich high water mark for Japanese samurai films whose enduring inspiration on Western cinema... global cinema, really... is staggering and incomparable (Seven Samurai’s descendants include everything from The Magnificent Seven to Ocean’s Eleven to A Bug’s Life)  ... and yet somehow it’s still only like my third or fourth favorite Kurosawa film.