Kurosawa both borrows heavily from other traditions and is in turn the inspiration for others:

King Lear -> Ran
Macbeth -> Throne of Blood (another favorite)

Yojimbo -> A Fistful of Dollars

Kagemusha is another favorite. Rashomon is an original and well worth seeing on the big screen. I’d love to see Stray Dog and Sanjuro at some point.

Samurai is long–I’d use the word “epic,” but that’s me–and you might have done better to see Rashomon or Yojimbo first as an exposure. And as for the acting–the range of performances has more to do, I think, with the time and place than talent. That is, some of Kurosawa’s cast were trained in a very formal stage style while others (particularly Toshiro Mifune, who played Kikuchiyo) were experimenting with a more “naturalistic” style similar to what became popular in the West in the ’50s (and is the basis for most modern movie acting, thus feeling more “contemporary”). The thing about it is that you find the same kind of things in, say, movies made in Germany in the 1920s or America in the 1930s; sometimes you have to just roll with the affected style as being the product of a certain kind of training or certain stylistic expectations, and it’s possible that some of what is considered “good” now won’t be in fifty years (indeed, Marlon Brando’s style of acting, considered very “natural” when he burst onto the scene, now seems a bit affected and mannered these days).

I wish you’d loved Samurai more, but what can I say? To each his own and all that. Still, maybe give Yojimbo–which was remade in Europe as A Fistful Of Dollars with Clint Eastwood and later in the U.S. as Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis–a shot sometime.