Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1952 • Japan
Starring Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki
One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, IKIRU shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death. Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived twopart structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, IKIRU is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Directors’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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L'argent
Directed by Robert Bresson • 1983 • France, Switzerland
Starring Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline LangIn his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Robert Bresson pushed his unique blend of spiritual rumination and formal rigor to a new level of astringency. Transposing a ...
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Where Is the Friend’s House?
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1987 • Iran
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of ...
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Touki bouki
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty • 1973 • Senegal
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this French New Wave-influenced fantasy-drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour...
