Kurosawa established himself as the preeminent cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare with his recasting of Macbeth as a samurai warlord in Throne of Blood (1957). Ran is an equally successful interpretation of King Lear which retains many of the main themes of Shakespeare’s play as it transforms the daughters into sons and transposes the action to sixteenth-century Japan. The shift and sway of a nation divided is vast, the chaos terrible, the battle scenes visually stunning—some of the most ghastly ever filmed—and the outcome even bleaker than Shakespeare’s. The only note of optimism resides in the nobility of the film itself: a huge, tormented canvas from which the powerful performances by Nakadai, Terao, and Harada explode.