"I like extremes because I find them most alive," Akira Kurosawa once commented, a sentiment reflected through the stylistic brashness and moral urgency of his films. The Japanese filmmaker best-known in the Western hemisphere and, thanks in part to a new 25-film Criterion box set, the one whose work has been made most comprehensively available to English-speaking audiences, Kurosawa embraces the hyperbolic. His films are meticulously choreographed and intensely felt, often staged in sweltering, freezing, or otherwise catastrophic conditions. He does not restrain his taste for the excessive in his directorial techniques: Kurosawa was legendary for his perfectionism, personally tinkering with everything from costumes to music to editing. To film Ran, his version of King Lear, Kurosawa famously built and then burned down an enormous castle set at the steps of Mount Fuji so he could record lead actor Tatsuya Nakadai as he slowly exited the flaming ruins. Who needs CGI?

Kurosawa's predilection for the overblown may irk those who prefer the restraint of traditional Japanese family dramas, but his impact on Western cinema can't be overstated–his films echo in the repertoire of everyone from George Lucas to Werner Herzog. To celebrate the director's upcoming centenary, Film Forum kicked off a month-long retrospective of Kurosawa's films last week. Beginning with Stray Dog, a gritty, dystopian police procedural set in post-war Tokyo, and ending with the epic, Shakespeare-with-samurais Ran, the series runs through 29 of the director's 31 films (the two omissions–Those Who Make Tomorrow and Madadayo–are minor works at either end of his career). None of these films will waste your time, but a few are particularly worth the trip to the theater in the mid-winter chill: Yojimbo, the sprawling Western-inspired tale of a scrubby ronin-for-hire, and Ikiru, which traces a bureaucrat's existential search after he is diagnosed with cancer. Kurosawa's works escape cliché because they are as sincere as they are heated, fevered valentines to the outer edges.

Film Forum's Kurosawa retrospective runs through Februrary 18th. Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston Street in New York.