Ikiru
Rent/Purchase
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
What critics thought
One of the most acclaimed films ever made, Ikiru earns its reputation through Takashi Shimura's towering central performance and Kurosawa's unusually intimate approach to a man confronting his own mortality. The film's structural boldness — shifting perspective after its hero's death — drew the only real critical friction at release, with some finding the second half anticlimactic even as others admired how it sustained dramatic tension without sentimentality. Decades of retrospective appreciation have only deepened its standing, though a dissenting minority considers that reverence overdue for reexamination.
“a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond”
Bosley Crowther·The New York Times
“a tour-de-force...keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish”
Variety
“the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“one of the triumphs of humanist cinema”
Wally Hammond·Time Out
Genres
Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorAkira Kurosawa
StarringTakashi Shimura, Haruo Tanaka, Nobuo Kaneko, Bokuzen Hidari, Miki Odagiri
ComposerFumio Hayasaka
Ikiru
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
What critics thought
One of the most acclaimed films ever made, Ikiru earns its reputation through Takashi Shimura's towering central performance and Kurosawa's unusually intimate approach to a man confronting his own mortality. The film's structural boldness — shifting perspective after its hero's death — drew the only real critical friction at release, with some finding the second half anticlimactic even as others admired how it sustained dramatic tension without sentimentality. Decades of retrospective appreciation have only deepened its standing, though a dissenting minority considers that reverence overdue for reexamination.
“a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond”
Bosley Crowther·The New York Times
“a tour-de-force...keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish”
Variety
“the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“one of the triumphs of humanist cinema”
Wally Hammond·Time Out
Genres
Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorAkira Kurosawa
StarringTakashi Shimura, Haruo Tanaka, Nobuo Kaneko, Bokuzen Hidari, Miki Odagiri
ComposerFumio Hayasaka
Rent/Purchase