The Samurai Trilogy is great. It's a fictionalized telling of Musashi Miyamoto's life based on a serial published in a Japanese newspaper between 1935 and 1939 (and was later released as the novel "Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era"). It was directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, and stars Toshiro Mifune as Miyamoto. I re-watch the trilogy once every couple of years. It's pretty solid.