Overview: As the British Film Institute launches a nationwide Akira Kurosawa retrospective, Jasper Sharp celebrates one of the titans of Japanese cinema, whose innovative and influential films have thrilled audiences around the world, from the Oscar-winning Rashomon, a film widely heralded as launching the wide-scale international interest in Japanese cinema in the 1950s, to the classic action-adventure films Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, to Kurosawa's resetting of Shakespeare in feudal Japan, Throne of Blood and Ran.