While it might not be one of Kurosawa’s most thematically accomplished or narratively complex samurai films, it is certainly one of his most visually ravishing, and that alone justifies its place in the pantheon of great action films

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2025

A staple of any serious cinephile’s education, as well as a worthy entry point for foreign-film novices wanting to get their feet wet before plunging into the deeper waters of Bergman or Fellini.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 5, 2025

Yojimbo is at times hilarious in its darkly comic take on human nature but also devastating in its reveal of just how evil men can be in their treatment of women and each other.

| Original Score: A | Jan 27, 2025

Yojimbo’s premise, concerning fisticuffs between samurai and ruffians that distract the populace from the seizure of power by white-collar thugs, has only grown more pertinent to our present day.

| Jan 9, 2025

[Yojimbo] is not four-star Kurosawa, but it rates a good three.

| Mar 6, 2024

Yojimbo is not a film that needs much critical analysis; its boisterous power and good spirits are right there on the surface. Lechery, avarice, cowardice, coarseness, animality, are rendered by fire; they become joy in life, in even [its] lowest forms.

| Oct 17, 2023

The film hasn't aged a day. Watching Yojimbo now, viewers will feel surprised by how modern it feels.

| Jun 27, 2023

Kurosawa creates a gritty and audacious period picture that manages to mix action with small bits of dark comedy while constantly showing off his technical savvy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

Redefining not only a Japanese genre but a Hollywood one, Kurosawa's Yojimbo testifies to the cyclical, international pathways of inspiration driving cinematic art.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 18, 2022

Mifune's broad range beautifully illustrates the complex morality Kurosawa spends his narrative grappling with, a moving exploration of society's worst inclinations.

| Jun 18, 2021

Yojimbo is intimate to the point of claustrophobia. Its wit is wry, its characters flawed and its world-view uncompromisingly cynical.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 14, 2020

Kurosawa combines his genius with Toshiro Mifune's Venice Film Festival's "best actor'' performance to come up with a film as suspenseful as [High Noon,] in which Gary Cooper dispatched his foes in the early 1950's American western.

| Feb 7, 2020

Master-director Akira Kurosawa has come up with another memorable work in this Japanese western, a gory caricature of the familiar cactus saga about the killer-for-hire...

| Oct 7, 2019

One expects more of Kurosawa. I am told he is parodying our Westerns; if so, the joke is not funny.

| Aug 1, 2019

Kurosawa's laconic awareness of the brusque farce of violence, and the permanence of melancholy, holds the film on a special balance between laughter and severity.

| Jul 18, 2018

A movie that is both a wow of a show and a masterpiece of misanthropy.

| Mar 4, 2013

Kurosawa's masterully executed acion film influenced many young directors, including Segio Leone.

| Original Score: B+ | May 17, 2011

A textbook example of the perfect crowd-pleaser.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 20, 2011

The biggest impression left by Yojimbo is the characterization of Sanjuro, whose iconography of stoic cool (that inspired Clint Eastwood's antiheroic "Man with No Name") is consistently undercut with dashes of comical realism...[Blu-ray]

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 28, 2010

This is one of those movies where it sounds like none of it should work and yet all of it somehow does.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 29, 2009