Let me make the case for Harakiri (1962) as the definitive deconstruction of a genre.

Masaki Kobayashi made Harakiri seven years before The Wild Bunch and ten years before Chinatown, and he did to the samurai film what those films did to the Western and to noir: he took the genre's central mythology and showed it for what it was.

The samurai honor code in Harakiri is revealed to be a tool of institutional power. It protects the powerful from accountability while demanding absolute sacrifice from those with no power. The film's central reversal — I won't spoil it — is one of the great narrative moves in 1960s cinema.

What's interesting is that Kobayashi doesn't make his hero simple. The moral clarity of his protagonist's position doesn't make him a hero in the traditional sense. He's right about everything and he still loses. The ending refuses catharsis and that refusal is the point.

If you've never seen it, it streams on Criterion Channel. Watch it before you read another word about it.