Seven Samurai (1954)

Kurosawa shoots the fighting in rain so heavy it turns the screen to static: horses, mud and bodies dissolving into one field of wet silver and charcoal.

Seven Samurai tells of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate farmers hire seven warriors to protect them from bandits, with Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura leading the cast. It runs 207 minutes, in black and white at 1.37:1, and moves between philosophy and relentless action, delicate feeling and spectacle.

The Criterion Collection lists it as spine number 2, in a new 4K restoration behind a black cover by Neil Kellerhouse.