It’s hard to find a film genre more pissed off and disillusioned than the samurai movie. Whether it’s a small-time samurai who endures various indignities at the hands of his clan boss until he finally erupts like a sword-slinging tornado, or a humorless drone so hell-bent on achieving promotions that he becomes a psychotic killing machine, samurai movies turn job dissatisfaction into Shakespearean epics of bad bosses and bloody class warfare.

Film Forum’s “Summer Samurai” festival (August 19-September 15) brings 15 of these movies to Manhattan, reintroducing New Yorkers to some of the first Asian films to break big in the West. The samurai genre was a vital part of our movie going diet prior to the 1980s: The Bijou Theater in Times Square premiered most of these films back in the 1960s and 1970s, and samurai movies became such a moneymaker that Japan’s Toho Studios actually operated the Bijou for several years (renaming it the Toho Cinema). Even after the Toho Cinema closed, eager fans flocked to retro houses to worship the latest installments in the “Zatoichi” and the “Lone Wolf and Cub” series.

Now those retro houses (and the Bijou) are gone, and it’s up to “Summer Samurai” to remind us of why a city full of desperate strivers and career-heads always had a deep love affair with the original hard-luck working stiff: the samurai.

Akira Kurosawa and his main leading man, Toshiro Mifune, are in full effect with such classics as “Seven Samurai” (August 26 & 27) and “The Hidden Fortress” (August 28 & 29), but frankly, you can skip these: The standard-issue Kurosawa Catalogue is available on video, and there’s richer meat on this menu. The same goes for “Zatoichi the Fugitive” (September 7), the fourth movie in the 26-film “Zatoichi” series, which stars the charismatic Shintaro Katsu as a blind masseur who roams Japan easing back and neck tension and decapitating arrogant jerks.

What you need to save room for are two lesser-known names: director Masaki Kobayashi and actor Tatsuya Nakadai. Kobayashi was once so revered that American cinemagoers mentioned his name in the same breath as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Without much of a video presence, he’s fallen into obscurity, but two of his deeply entertaining movies are on display: “Samurai Rebellion” (August 19-25) starring Mifune, and the harrowing “Harakiri” with Mr. Nakadai (September 4, 5 & 6).

These are the ultimate bad-boss nightmares. In “Samurai Rebellion,” Mifune plays a mid-level samurai approaching retirement who has always done the right thing. He married someone picked out by his clan, endured his loveless marriage, kept up his skills during decades of boring peace, and never caused a fuss. Even when his lord foisted one of his used concubines on Mifune’s son as a wife, he just bowed his head and accepted it.

But now it turns out that the concubine is actually the mother of the heir to the throne, and the lord’s household wants her back. Mifune, having watched his son fall in love with his arranged bride, not only defies his boss, but threatens to register a complaint with the higher-ups back in the home office. Things get so tense that it’s almost a relief when Mifune finally straps on swords, packs up the tatami mats (“to keep from slipping on the blood,” he cheerily explains), and waits for the unstoppable hordes of henchmen to arrive so he can tell them to take this job and shove it … right through their necks with his 3-foot katana.

Far more horrifying is “Harakiri,” a film shot with all the surreal angles and stark cinematography of a horror movie. A starving samurai, played by the cadaverous Mr. Nakadai, appears at the gates of a clan mansion asking for a quiet place to disembowel himself. The clan leader honors his request, but suspects it’s a con. When Mr. Nakadai’s second (the guy who chops off his head once he can’t pull out any more of his intestines) calls in sick, the plot thickens into a moral swamp of bad-faith dealings that makes the folks at Enron look like Boy Scouts. This turns out to be a grueling journey into the heart of darkness as Mr. Nakadai turns in the ultimate resignation letter. If there’s one masterpiece in the entire lineup, this is it.

While Mifune is a roaring, operatic presence in many of these movies, Mr. Nakadai proves himself to be the more interesting actor. His performances range from a sadistic samurai who’s clearly going postal in “The Sword of Doom” (September 9 & 10), to his turn in the surreal genre send-up “Kill!” (September 1, 2 & 3) as a conniving, homeless samurai fed up with the stoic suffering and honorable bloodshed in his job description.

If you’re just looking for some rollicking escapism, however, take a big gulp of “Samurai Saga” (September 13 & 14). Shot in blinding Technicolor, it’s an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the story of a poet-warrior who can never fall in love because of his enormous nose. It’s a funky old world we live in where the best adaptation of a 19th century French play is a 1959 samurai movie set in 17th-century Japan, but this is a far better version of “Cyrano” than Jose Ferrer’s overly fussy 1950 version or Gerard Depardieu’s 1990 slab of Gallic cheese. Mifune’s performance is vitally alive. As he breathes his last in a shower of cherry blossoms, abandoned by everyone except his one true friend, it’s hard to imagine that the immortal Cyrano was ever anything other than a Japanese samurai.

Until September 15 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).