Action · Drama · History
Japanese (乱)
1985 · Directed by Akira Kurosawa · 160 min
In sixteenth-century Japan, an aging warlord who has conquered his rivals decides to hand his power to his sons. Kurosawa recasts King Lear as a samurai epic of vast landscapes, colour-coded armies and slow, formal tragedy.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining late-career work of Japanese cinema's golden-age generation and one of the great Shakespeare adaptations, it showed that large-scale historical epics could still be made as serious personal art in the 1980s.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a moving painting: let the composition, colour and distance say what the characters will not.
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