I watched The Seven Samurai, often called the greatest Japanese film of all time, which shows you something about reps because it was considered the third best the year it came out.
Given its reputation, the fact that so much of it has been imitated, and the reams of critical analysis, there's not much point in another review, so I'll just say this: It's almost three and a half hours long, but if you start watching it and think after 20 minutes, "Man, I can't take this. This sucks," don't give up.
It has a very slow beginning, and the stakes are so low that it's hard for someone used to Hollywood-style titanic conflicts to much care. As a comfortable American, I had to struggle in the beginning to see what difference the outcome made, considering the horrible misery of the people involved anyway. (Best example: The samurai are to be paid with three bowls of rice each.)
As the movie progressed, though, it became engrossing the way epics do. The smallness of the millieu actually is a strength in that by the end, you do feel a part of it: you've spent almost the entire three-plus hours in a tiny Japanese village in an action that for the most part takes three days. When it actually ended, I didn't have the sense of "at long last," but felt more like having read a lengthy novel, with the similar feeling of being drawn in that books have over film.
Two other comments: The film was made just seven years (I think) after WWII, which also impressed me. And the violence is probably the most suggested, least actualized that I've ever seen in a film.
