being a film director." Andrei Tarkovsky cited Kurosawa as one of his favorites and named Seven Samurai as one of his ten favorite films. Sidney Lumet called Kurosawa the "Beethoven of movie directors". Werner Herzog reflected on film-makers with whom he feels kinship and the movies that he admires: According to an assistant, Stanley Kubrick considered Kurosawa to be "one of the great film directors" and spoke of him "consistently and admiringly", to the point that a letter from him "meant more than any Oscar" and caused him to agonize for months over drafting a reply. Robert Altman upon first seeing Rashomon was so impressed by the sequence of frames of the sun that he began to shoot the same sequences in his work the very next day, he claimed. George Lucas cited the movie The Hidden Fortress as the main inspiration for his film Star Wars. He also cited other films of Kurosawa as his favorites including Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Ikiru. Zack Snyder cited him as one of his influences for his underdeveloped Netflix film Rebel Moon. Kurosawa was ranked third in the directors' poll and fifth in the critics' poll in Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time. Criticism Kenji Mizoguchi, the acclaimed director of Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) was eleven years Kurosawa's senior. After the mid-1950s, some critics of the French New Wave began to favor Mizoguchi to Kurosawa. New Wave critic and film-maker Jacques Rivette, in particular, thought Mizoguchi to be the only Japanese director whose work was at once entirely Japanese and truly universal; Kurosawa, by contrast was thought to be more influenced by Western cinema and culture, a view that has been disputed. In Japan, some critics and filmmakers considered Kurosawa to be elitist. They viewed him to center his effort and attention on exceptional or heroic characters. In her DVD commentary on Seven Samurai, Joan Mellen argued that certain shots of the samurai characters Kambei and Kyuzo, which show Kurosawa to have accorded higher status or validity to them, constitutes evidence for this point of view. These Japanese critics argued that Kurosawa was not sufficiently progressive because the peasants were unable to find leaders from within their ranks. In an interview with Mellen, Kurosawa defended himself, saying, From the early 1950s, Kurosawa was also charged with catering to Western tastes due to his popularity