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List Price: $39.95Amazon.com's Price: $24.99 You Save: $14.96 (37%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9780780026919
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, NTSC
ISBN: 0780026918
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: January 06, 2004
Running Time: 140 minutes
Sales Rank: 10942
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 1952
Editorial Review:
Description:
In this film, considered by some critics to be Akira Kurosawa's greatest and most compassionate achievement, Takashi Shimura (Seven Samurai) portrays Kenji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer forced to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days.
Amazon.com essential video:
Blessed with timeless humanity, grace, and heartbreaking compassion, Ikiru is one of the most moving dramas in the history of film. Legendary director Akira Kurosawa is best remembered for his samurai epics, but this contemporary masterpiece ranks among his greatest achievements, matched in every respect by the finest performance of Takashi Shimura's celebrated career. Shimura, who nobly led the Seven Samurai two years later, is sublimely perfect as a melancholy civil servant who, upon learning that he has terminal cancer, realizes he has nothing to show for his dreary, unsatisfying life. He seeks solace in nightlife and family, to no avail, until a simple inspiration leads him to a final, enduring act of public generosity. Expressing his own thoughts about death and the universal desire for a meaningful existence, Kurosawa infuses this drama with social conscience and deep, personal conviction, arriving at a conclusion that is emotionally overwhelming and simply unforgettable. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 'How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death.'
This is most probably the greatest film about life and what it means to live.
Watanabe is suffering from stomach cancer. With imminent death in his future, Watanabe resolves to figuring out how to spend his last days. The film is expertly plotted: During the first half we see Watanabe before his death, coping with his illness, dealing with his relationship to his son and daughter-in-law, his fascination with one of his young subordinates and his struggle to find his purpose in life. ... Read More
Rating: - Masterpiece
Ikiru (To Live), by Akira Kurosawa, is sort of a `lost' film. No, it was never really lost, but it is unlike the archetypal Kurosawa film Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay. It is more in line with the genre of retrospective life films in the vein of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane or Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, in that we drop in the on the life of an ordinary man- in this case lifelong ... Read More
Rating:  - Extraordinary allegory - realization of death gives new meaning to life
Watanabe-san, a government bureaucratic drone with a monochromatic life, learns that he has stomach cancer and just a few months to live. This realization galvanizes him into making some large changes in his life, pursuing new relationships and noticing the beauty in everyday occurrences, like sunsets.
Most importantly, he takes up the one-man mission of championing the renovation of a local cesspool field into a children's park.
Only when he learned he was going to die did ... Read More
Rating: - Will Anyone Know You Lived
Ikiru tells the deceptively simple story of a man's final months. Kurosawa was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilych and, admittedly, the subject matter of a man who has wasted his life being prompted by imminent death to examine his life & make something of what little he has left was not new even when Tolstoy penned his take on it. Kurosawa brings his master director's touch to an age-old idea. What does it mean to live?
A bland middle-aged government functionary who has spent thirty ... Read More
Rating:  - Just Another Reason Why The "Lesser" Kurosawa Is Easily the Most Overrated Director of All Time
This review continues my recent assault on particular cinematic themes that annoy me incessantly, and therefore require a therapeutic purging via an extensive (and scathing) IMDb review. The topic in question here is Akira Kurosawa - hereafter referred to as the "lesser" Kurosawa, primarily because when one hears the name Kurosawa one should immediately think of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is superior in almost every respect to this "lesser" Kurosawa, a director artificially propped up on an undeserving pedestal ... Read More
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