Ran

Kurosawa's retelling of King Lear (with some significant changes, particularly the flipping of the children's genders, the emphasis on the aging ruler's past acts of violent conquest, and the harder-edged reading given to the Cordelia figure's character, Saburo) makes for an intense and rewarding experience. It struck me as grittier and more grimly existential than Shakespeare's play, using 'existential' in a sense informed by that specific 20th century stream of continental thought, though it lacks that other's almost Romantic sense of existential (in a wider and possibly deeper sense) anguish and outrage and something of its sense of grandeur and scope; still, it's much more faithful than not to its source, and in a way which is obviously carefully thought through and strikingly consistent and effective in its divergences, and in how it deals with the themes of the play in its own fashion (the way that it grounds Hidetora's - ie, Lear's - tragedy in his past actions, giving it an air of inevitability, is particularly striking, as is the way it deals with the notion of loyalty). It creates its own world and fully inhabits it for the whole of its two and a half (nearly three) hour running time - it's monumental.