Yojimbo/Sanjuro: Two Samurai Films by Akira Kurosawa | 4K UHD+Blu-ray

Can any Akira Kurosawa pictures really be called light and breezy? Probably not. But Yojimbo and Sanjuro are about as close as the director ever came to making the kind of serialized genre fare that dominated the Japanese film industry in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.

For many viewers, their first interaction with these films will have come from Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, which transformed Yojimbo into a Western star-making vehicle for Clint Eastwood. If that's the case, then Toshiro Mifune's countenance and demeanor will come off as startlingly familiar, since so much of Eastwood's cinematic presence comes from channeling Mifune's performance in this film.

A captivating story of moral degradation amid a gang war in rural Japan of the 1800s, Kurosawa's films hastened a transformation of the Chanbara genre from classic chivalrous tales of court intrigue to gritty, pulpier stories of lone Ronin. That this film also kicked off the Spaghetti Western boom in Italy, making a star of Eastwood in the process, makes it one of the most influential sets of movies in cinema history.