Director Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest and most influential Japanese directors of all time, and during September a prestigious collection of his films will play on Rialto Directors, every Sunday at 8.30pm.

You’ll be able to watch the master at work in films such as Rashomon (1950) a crime drama that tells the story of a rape and murder through the eyes of the three people involved, as well as a witness. The film received an honorary award at the 1952 Academy Awards for Best foreign language film released in the United States during 1951, and Oscar nomination for Best Art Direction in 1953. This was the film that announced Japanese cinema to the world, and stars Toshirô Mifune, one of the several actors Kurosawa loyally worked with over and over again.

After Rashomon and The Idiot, Kurosawa began working on a film called Ikiru (1952) which wasn’t released internationally until 1960. Roger Ebert in The Great Movies describes Ikiru as “his greatest film”, and a turning point in his career. The critic Michael Jeck observed that most of Kurosawa’s earlier works focused on characters that fitted in and conformed to the Japanese virtue of teamwork, while his later films featured misfits and nonconformists.

Ikiru is a good example of this change, exploring the world of the rebel. It tells the story of a low-level government bureaucrat who discovers he’s dying of cancer and leaves his job of 30 years to find something meaningful to do in the last year of his life. Takashi Shimura stared as the bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, and was another regular in Kurosawa’s films.

Both Shimura and Mifune starred in the epic Seven Samurai, the most well known internationally of Kurosawa’s film, and which led to him being regarded as one of the most Western of the Japanese directors. Seven Samurai tells the story of a 16th century village that hire a group of Samurai to protect them from invading bandits. It’s a tale of courage and hope, and was followed by a Hollywood remake, The Magnificent Seven.

It wasn’t the last time a Kurosawa’s action hero film would influence Hollywood. Yojimbo (1961) was remade as A Fistful of Dollars and, as I’ve discovered via my son’s obsession with Star Wars, George Lucas was inspired by these films and Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958).

Also premiering this month are detective thriller High and Low (1962) and, one of Kurosawa’s last works before his death in 1998, his take on Shakespeare’s King Leah, Ran (1995), set once again in the 16th century. It won Kurosawa an Oscar for Best Costume Design.

All are epic, either as an exploration of humanity or as large-scale historical action pieces. Influential, moving and completely absorbing, these are an exceptional collection of films.