Some great directors bring to the world of cinema new themes or styles or ideas or possibilities. Akira Kurosawa introduced an entire hemisphere. Released in 1950, RASHOMON wasn’t the director’s first masterpiece, but it was the one that opened the West to the majesty of Japanese cinema. The great legacy of his career, which spanned a full half century, is not just the many classics he made himself, nor the groundbreaking and genre-bending artistry with which he made them, but also the countless figures and films that benefitted from his influence: from Altman and Scorsese and Tarantino and Coppola (both father and daughter) to THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and STAR WARS and, well, pretty much any quality film you see today. Kurosawa is in all of them in some way, his genius so ingrained into the language of cinema as to be inseparable from all that it inspires.