Metacritic Film

Seven Samurai (re-release)

Starring Takashi Shimura, Toshirô Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki, Daisuke Katô, and Isao Kimura

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Coboy Pictures
Foreign
207 minutes | B/W
Japan
Released In Theaters August 30, 2002

Akira Kurosawa's 1956 classic, set in 16th Century Japan, stands as the prototypical action film.

WRITTEN BY
Shinobu Hashimoto
Akira Kurosawa
Hideo Oguni

DIRECTED BY
Akira Kurosawa

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

99 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Boston Globe Ty Burr
Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.
100 TV Guide Staff (Not credited)
Much imitated, still unsurpassed. By critical consensus one of the best movies ever made, The Seven Samurai covers so much emotional, historical, and cinematic ground that that it demands to be viewed over and over again.
100 Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The legendary Mifune leads a superb cast, and Kurosawa's kinetic camera keeps the adventure sizzling with energy and wit from start to finish.
100 New York Daily News Jami Bernard
It's impossible to imagine how the action genre would have developed without Akira Kurosawa's watershed 1954 movie Seven Samurai.
90 Village Voice J. Hoberman
Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.

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