Talking exclusively about what's available here, everyone is going to tell you to watch Seven Samurai and Rashomon and Yojimbo and whatever, they're correct. You already know those ones are great, you've already seen them, you know that Kurosawa is an incredible director. If you haven't, yeah, go watch those now.
But if you have, here's the low key Kurosawa picks I think you should check out:
The Hidden Fortress
This is the movie that George Lucas was copying beat-for-beat when he made A New Hope. The thing is... watching this is just going to make you appreciate both Lucas and Kurosawa even more, because it turns out, it's a great movie either way! Just a real great adventure. Guest starring the most powerful eyebrows you've ever seen on a fired-up princess. I love her.
The Bad Sleep Well
Obviously the best Shakespeare adaptation in the world is Ran, Kurosawa's version of King Lear, but this is him doing a great job at pulling gold out of Hamlet, starring Toshiro Mifune investigating post-WWII corporate corruption, and the most dramatic deployment of a cake at a wedding that you've ever seen in your life. Genuinely interested in using adaptation as an excuse to explore its own conclusions about revenge and evil.
Dreams
Laura is correct. This movie is wild. Watching the absolute master of black and white movies do colour is like seeing Piccolo throwing off the weighted training clothes. If you wanna see some fucking i m a g e r y, you gotta watch Dreams.
Kurosawa has a lot of good ones! I've watched some on HBO Max, but there's a ton at the IA link!
Another Kurosawa film that's neat (but not on IA? maybe I'll have to fix that):
Ran
A colorful 1985 adaptation of King Lear, Ran is worth watching even if just for for Peter's depiction of the fool as a noblewoman jester with a lot of good quips. There's also a lot of great outfits.
Kurosawa remorsefully based the role of king Lear on himself, making the king somewhat more cruel. The film was written to star Toshiro Mifune (who is in a ton of Kurosawa films), but they had a falling-out and he cast Nakadai instead.
It's really fun! Definitely worth a watch
