Seven Samurai (70th Anniversary 4K Restoration)

Get set for the heart-pounding, adrenaline-soaked, explosive new film season Art of Action. Part of BFI's Art of Action, a UK-wide film season celebrating high-octane cinema, we're bringing a wide-ranging selection of the best-ever action titles to our screens, each including an expert introduction. 

Enjoy any three films from this season (excluding Kubo and the Two Strings, which is Donate What You Can) for the special price of £24 when you book them at the same time. Simply select your tickets and the discount will be applied automatically at the checkout.

This screening includes a 5 minute 10 second intermission after 106 minutes.

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was recently voted number 20 in Sight and Sound’s The Greatest Films of All Time list and is arguably the centrepiece of one of the most towering careers in film history. 

A thrilling, sweeping black and white epic running over 3 hours, the film tells a simple story. A village of farmers is beset by bandits, who demand a tribute of food under threat of violence. Desperate, the peasants hire a group of Samurai to protect them. Kurosawa spins this into a masterclass in storytelling, building up to one of the most spectacular action sequences ever committed to film in the rain-soaked, days-long climactic siege which dominates the last hour of the film. But there is more than just food being fought over; this is an elegiac portrait of the dying days of the samurai class.

It's hard to overstate Seven Samurai’s influence on action cinema. The film would go on to inspire countless future films. While the western the Magnificent Seven (a direct remake transplanted to the American frontier) is the most obvious example, without Seven Samurai there would also be no Star Wars (the story has shown up in multiple incarnations in that galaxy far, far away), and the battle scenes in films like Peter Jackson’s the Lord of the Rings trilogy owe a huge debt to Kurosawa’s mastery of the form. 

In taking time to establish the stakes, the characters and their relationships, as well as the geography of the battleground, Kurosawa’s skill, creativity and ground-breaking editing techniques ensure that the audience is kept on the edge of their seat throughout.