Barnes & Noble

Akira Kurosawa's last great period film may also be his grandest. While not as innovative as Rashomon or The Seven Samurai and not as lean as Yojimbo or Throne of Blood, 1985's Ran (literally translated, "Chaos") is a film utterly colossal in both conception and execution. Loosely based on Shakespeare's King Lear, the story follows the tragic chain of events set in motion after the aging warlord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) divides his hard-won kingdom among his sons. Warfare and treachery follow -- the latter instigated by the vengeful Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) -- as the exiled and hunted Hidetora confronts the ghosts of his bloody past. Kurosawa injects the Western source material with Buddhist perspectives on redemption and forgiveness while capturing the proceedings with dazzling visuals that are both beautiful and horrific. No less attention has gone into the performances: Nakadai's haunted Hidetora and Harada's spiderlike Kaede rank as some of the most unforgettable creations in the director's oeuvre. With enough gripping human drama to match the colossal size of its battle scenes, Ran is not merely one of Kurosawa's grandest accomplishments but one of cinema's as well. Volk Lindsay

All Movie Guide

Ran is Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The Lear counterpart is an elderly 16th-century warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai), who announces that he's about to divide his kingdom equally among his three sons. In his dotage, he falls prey to the false flattery of his treacherous sons (Akira Terao and Jinpachi Nezu), while banishing his youngest son (Daisuke Ryu), the only member of the family who loves him enough to tell him the unvarnished truth. Thanks to his foolish pride, his domain collapses under its own weight as the sons battle each other over total control. Kurosawa's first film in five years, Ran had been in the planning stages for twice that long; Kurosawa had storyboarded the project with a series of vivid color paintings that have since been published in book form in England. The battle scenes are staged with such brutal vigor that it's hard to imagine that the director was 75 years old at the time. This 160-minute historical epic won several international awards, but it was not a hit in Japan, and it would be five more years before Kurosawa would be able to finance another picture. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 5050582730081
• Source: STUDIO CANAL
• Editions: Special Edition, Subtitled, Special Packaging
• Sales Rank: 2,424