Ikiru (Living)
Opens Friday 18 July
Dir: Akira Kurosawa, With: Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagiri, Makoto Kobori, Kumeko Urabe
Japan 1952, 143 mins, Cert PG
'A masterpiece of humanist cinema' ****
Empire
Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru is the modern-day tale of a lonely man confronting death in post-war Tokyo. One of the greatest actors of Japanese cinema, Takashi Shimura, plays Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged civil servant who has slavishly devoted himself to his job for thirty years, only to find that he now has inoperable stomach cancer. With limited time left, and the feeling that he has never truly lived at all, Watanabe embarks on a quest to make the most of his remaining days. After bouts of self-pity, a spell of hedonism and a doomed attempt at a platonic relationship, he commits himself doggedly to the task of converting a city dump into a children's playground.
Tough-minded and unsentimental throughout, this is one of Kurosawa's finest films and also offers a vivid and satirical portrait of post-war Tokyo.
Opens 18 July
27 - 30 August
From 5 September
12 - 18 September
4 - 7 October
6 - 7 October
14 October
26 October
30 October
19 November
