Movies

January, 1986

Moviemakers, even at their peak, rarely match the grandeur of great theater in probing the awesome dimensions of mankind's vanity, cruelty, treachery and lust for power. You go to Shakespeare for that, and the Bard's King Lear is the source of Ran (Orion Classics), an overpowering work by Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese director who already owns a black belt for sheer brilliance dating back to the 1951 Rashomon and beyond. In his recycled Lear, Kurosawa is more samurai than Shakespearean. He has se...