Ran (1985)

★ 8.0 2h 40m 1,786 votes IMDb

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

Ran

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Cast

Tatsuya Nakadai
Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora Ichimonji Died 2025 · Meguro, Tokyo, Japan Tatsuya Nakadai (仲代 達矢, Nakadai Tatsuya; born Motohisa Nakadai; December 13, 1932 – November 8, 2025) was a Japanese actor. Widely regarded as one of the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cin...
Akira Terao
Akira Terao as Taro Takatora Ichimonji Age 78 · Kanagawa, Japan Akira Terao (寺尾 聰, Terao Akira, born May 18, 1947) is Japanese musician and movie actor. Description above from the Wikipedia article Akira Terao, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors o...
Jinpachi Nezu
Jinpachi Nezu as Jiro Masatora Ichimonji Died 2016 · Tsuru, Yamanashi, Japan Jinpachi Nezu  (根津 甚八, Nezu Jinpachi, 1 December 1947 – 29 December 2016) was a Japanese actor. He has appeared in 56 films and television shows since 1974. He starred in the 1982 film Farewell to the...
Daisuke Ryū
Daisuke Ryū as Saburo Naotora Ichimonji Died 2021 · Tokyo, Japan Daisuke Ryu was a Japanese actor born in Tokyo, Japan on 14 February 1957. He won the Japanese "best new actor" Blue ribbon award for his performance as the legendary warrior Oda Nobunaga in Akira Kur...
Mieko Harada
Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede Age 67 · Toshima, Tokyo, Japan Mieko Harada (原田 美枝子, Harada Mieko, born on December 26, 1958) is a Japanese actress from Tokyo. She has played various roles in many motion pictures, television shows and television dramas since her...
Yoshiko Miyazaki
Yoshiko Miyazaki as Lady Sue Age 67 · Higashi, Kumamoto, Japan Yoshiko Miyazaki (宮崎美子, born 11 December 1958) is a Japanese actress..

Audience Reviews

Filipe Manuel Neto 7/10 Apr 23, 2023
**A good film, full of detail and historical verisimilitude, but painfully long without needing to be.**

I've already seen two of Akira Kurosawa's most renowned films and, quite frankly, I still can't understand why this Japanese director is so commonly considered a cinematic genius. His films are quite good, they're meticulous, there's a lot of attention to detail, but they're not particularly unforgettable… that's what I think.

This film is an adaptation of the plot of “King Lear”, by Shakespeare: a warlord, in the middle of the Japanese feudal era, decides to withdraw and divide his lands, power and castles among his three sons. Only one of them disagrees and warns him that it is highly unlikely that they will stay together as brothers, which provokes the old father's wrath. However, the future proves true for the younger son's words when the two older brothers despise their father and conflicts begin. Driven mad and accompanied only by a fool, the old man ends up mad while the brothers fight each other.

I won't talk about the cast because I don't know these actors. I can only say that they worked well, within the context and the type of film we are talking about. There is an excessive stylization, both in terms of interpretation and in terms of dialogues, which sounds theatrical, forced, but I don't know if that was on purpose. On a technical level, the film has a lot of points in its favor, starting with an excellent cinematography, very colorful and with good lighting. The sets are superb, in particular the castles, recreated to the smallest detail, and the costumes are also good, beautiful and historically credible. I don't think I'll be being unfair if I say that this film probably has some of the best war scenes in period films set in Japan. There is no CGI, special effects have been used judiciously, and the war has been recreated to be as authentic as possible, with hundreds of extras dressed to the nines and a lot of effort on the part of the production. For a historian, you can't ask for more.

The big problem with this movie is that it wasn't made to entertain but to make you think, and it's full of scenes and sequences designed to make the viewer think about what they're watching. It's something that would work, if it weren't sometimes overly cryptic. The audience needs to understand what the director wants to convey, and that often doesn't happen. Furthermore, it is a film that does not spare the audience: it starts very well, it ends very well, but everything in between is unbearably prolonged and distended. What could be said or done in two minutes is done in five minutes, and there are a lot of dialogues and scenes that don't seem to have any function other than to make the film take longer.

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