What do you consider to be Kurosawa's best? He has all the meticulous obsessive detail that Kubrick has but has humane warmth in his films.
You should try his Sanjuro, starring his muse, Toshiro Mifune. I would also recommend Kill! by another master, Kihachi Okamoto. It's based on exactly the same story, starring Tatsuya Nakadai (the lead who succeeded Mifune as Kurosawa's muse) but told from a cynical and satirical view of the whole samurai honor and such. Just as good as Sanjuro. Another great by Okamoto is Sword of Doom, a sociopath samurai's gradual descent into destruction.
The greatest movie of that era, in my opinion, is Harakiri by yet another master filmmaker, Masaki Kobayashi.