Like Rashomon is Heian period; Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood (maybe), and Hidden Fortress are in the Sengoku period; Yojimbo is in the Bakumatsu and Sanjuro is pre-Bakumatsu forget which era was on an IMDb post a long while ago, also Red Beard, Kagemusha, and Ran but haven't seen them yet. Seven Samurai takes place in 1586 and Yojimbo takes place in 1860 to be exact. I was just wondering, Japan's history is interesting and I love Kurosawa's movies.
I have only seen Seven Samurai (it's for sure Sengoku) and Rashomon (which is not Sengoku). I could see Seven Samurai actually taking place with villagers hiring a few mercenaries to help them deal with bandits. And I really like that they said very clearly samurai themselves are really no better than bandits.
I have two complaints. One is that guns of the time are not sniper rifles. Accuracy was 50m and even against unarmored targets effective range was probably 80 to 100m at best. The samurai shouldn't have been picked off one by one from where they couldn't reply. The other is that the villagers seem too helpless, especially when they have numbers on their side and arms and armor stashed away (that they took from dead and dying samurai iirc) and that the samurai they hired were not all that special. While it's not weird that to me they go hire some "specialists", like an arquebus team or something, it's weird to me none of them don the weapons and armor and know how to fight. The Sengoku was a time when farming villages armed and fortified themselves against raids and they actively hunted down stray groups of samurai for loot and revenge. Especially as they were obviously in an area where central authority had broken down and they couldn't just report the bandits to their lord samurai. If an entire large village was having trouble with a group of bandits brazenly raiding in daylight, seven normal rōnin should have made no difference.
After reading the synopsis for Ran, I think it very well captures the politics of the Sengoku, with all the disloyalty and backstabbing and trying desperately to find alliances and succession crisis, etc. etc. Like the Seven Samurai, the story is fiction, but the feeling and setting of the Sengoku seems accurate to me.
Kagemusha is more of a standard historical fiction. It's main plot point is possible (Shingen did supposedly ask for the news of his death be hidden for 3 years, and body doubles were likely not a rare thing in the Sengoku) but highly improbable. Except for the story of the body double itself and the Takeda's internal politics, the rest of the events are in general pretty accurate. The movie's iconic depiction of the Battle of Nagashino, however, has become the myth that Sengoku historians try to dispel.