Ran

Having already left an indelible mark on world cinema with his classics Seven Samurai, High & Low, Ikiru and Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa delivered this epic late career masterwork as he turned 75. Loosely adapting Shakespeare’s King Lear into a samurai spectacle, Ran remains jaw-dropping forty years on.

A warlord leaves his throne to his three sons, beginning a succession crisis that wreaks bloody chaos across the land. At the time of release, Ran was Japan’s most expensive film ever made and the detail and sumptuousness of the period costuming and sets is only matched by its thoughtful spiritual enquiry on the cost of man’s quest for supremacy.