"The Film Forum's bracingly sanguinary "Summer Samurai" series is,
among other things, a useful reminder that before Chinese martial
artists became iconic figures for Western action-movie aficionados,
stern, unsmiling Japanese swordsmen were pretty much all we knew about
Eastern styles of violence and the rigorous codes that governed them.
We learned much of this, of course, from the peerless Akira Kurosawa,
five of whose pictures (including the greatest of them all, the
1954 "Seven Samurai") are in this 15-film series. But for many of Film
Forum's patrons, I suspect, the revelation of the four-week
extravaganza, which starts Friday, will be the fiercely beautiful work
of Masaki Kobayashi. His two movies here, "Harakiri" (1962)
and "Samurai Rebellion" (1967), are amazing: stirring, subversive and,
beneath their dauntingly severe surfaces, sneakily lyrical."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/movies/14raff.html?oref=login