Yojimbo & Sanjuro 4K Review (2025)

A pair of Akira Kurosawa classics hit 4K for the first time, and as ever it’s an ideal format to take in the master’s beautiful imagery and spectacular action scenes. In Yojimbo, we’re introduced to Toshiro Mifune‘s wandering ronin Sanjuro as he arrives in a town being torn apart by a war between two rival gangs; and in Sanjuro, we meet up with him again as he teams up with a band of young samurai to try and root out corrupt local officials.

Sanjuro is a good movie, but Yojimbo is the big draw here, one of Kurosawa’s masterpieces and a perfect showcase for Mifune’s boundless charisma. He’s almost the opposite of Kikuchiyo, the character he played in Seven Samurai: quiet, reserved, initially reluctant to get involved but with a profound sense of right and wrong once he does. It’s a cynical film, with practically everyone apart from him either actively involved in the gang war or too scared to do anything about it, in which Sanjuro’s role is essentially to show up and cut through everyone else’s nonsense.

And cut through a fair few people as well, for that matter. The scenes where he single-handedly takes on the gangsters are breathtakingly choreographed and ably show off how dangerous Sanjuro is, and the non-action scenes are unfailingly gorgeous to look at too. The climax, where he walks alone down the main street in a wide shot while dust blows across the frame, is genuinely stunning, and perhaps the point in Kurosawa‘s filmography that feels most like a Western.

Kurosawa was a big fan of Westerns, and they were a significant influence on him; here, we can see the parallels between samurai and gunslinger particularly clearly – as did Sergio Leone. Yojimbo‘s dustbowl vistas, loner protagonist, and cynical tone feel thoroughly proto-spaghetti Western, so it’s a small wonder that Leone remade it as A Fistful of Dollars, a masterpiece in itself. If you like Fistful, you’ll like Yojimbo, since they’re pretty much the same movie.

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Sanjuro has a very tough act to follow, then, and it is a bit of a letdown by comparison. To be clear, it isn’t anywhere close to being bad, but as John McClane would say, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” It’s not a simple retread, not least because Sanjuro has a team of samurai backing him up this time around, but it is quite similar, and that team is also part of the problem. They’re strictly ing players, there are loads of them, and the movie is a brisk 95 minutes, leaving precious little scope for Kurosawa to meaningfully develop them.

Still, Mifune remains an enormously compelling anchor, a born movie star, and the fight scenes are, if anything, even more impressive than in Yojimbo. It’s a lesser work but in the same way as The Hidden Fortress – when you know Kurosawa-made movies like Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and Ran, you go in with unfair expectations of mastery.

Regardless, you get one all-time classic and one solid samurai flick in this set, and it’s impossible not to recommend on that basis. Frankly, it’s worth it for Yojimbo alone, which is one of the greats in its own right, as well as a fascinating touchstone in the long-lasting, ongoing tug-of-war of influences between samurai cinema and Westerns.