Seven Samurai

A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.

Now regarded by critics and filmmakers worldwide as one of the greatest films ever made, Seven Samurai drew a more complicated reception in its own time and place — Japanese critics were cool to its mass appeal, and some Western reviewers condescended to it by reducing it to a genre exercise. The persistent critical debate concerns whether Kurosawa's identification with his samurai heroes is humanistic or elitist, and whether the film's moral complexity around the peasant-samurai relationship is fully realized or undercut by the gap in stature between protagonist and supporting cast.