Kurosawa: Classic Collection

The highlight of this five-film box is Ikiru (aka Living ), one of the greatest films ever made and Kurosawa's finest non-samurai movie. Set in modern Japan it takes a hackneyed subject – a middle-aged civil servant (superbly played by Takashi Shimura) reacting to a diagnosis of terminal cancer – and turns it into a profound, moving, unforgettable statement about the human condition. Three of the other films star the charismatic Toshiro Mifune : I Live in Fear (1955), the nuclear-angst tale of a man bent on taking his family to safety in Brazil; the rarely shown The Lower Depths (1957), a fascinating transposition of Gorky's play to a changing 19th-century Japan; and Red Beard (1965), a medical epic about a dedicated doctor (Mifune's last Kurosawa movie) in a country clinic. The fifth film, Dodes'ka-den (1970), a mosaic narrative about dreamily eccentric slum-dwellers, was Kurosawa's first colour picture and influenced by Antonioni's Red Desert . Its critical and popular failure resulted in a suicide attempt.