This is a western where the rocks are papier-mache. The contradiction at the core of Ran only adds to its primal power: it's a visually magnificent film that exposes humanity at its ugliest. This is a bleak and pessimistic film, one that looks back not just on feudal Japan but on the calamitous 20th century itself, finally stumbling to its end still overshadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. The weather becomes torrential in tandem with the drama, until Hidetora loses all his senses Nakadai's soul-scraping performance is just as stunning to behold as the renowned battle scenes. The youngest son protests and is banished for his impudence, but the lord's real sworn enemy turns out to be his eldest daughter-in-law. Set in 16th-century Japan, the film looks on uneasily as the aging overlord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) decides to divide up his kingdom among his three sons. Yet Ran (aka "Chaos") - partly based on King Lear - is undoubtedly the great director's late-career masterpiece, and something of a paradox: an impeccably orchestrated depiction of moral pandemonium.
Kurosawa was well into his 70s when the project began shooting the film-maker's eyesight was in bad decline, he'd been battling depression, and his wife died during production. Harrison Ford reinforced his Mount Rushmore status as Indy, the swashbuckling adventurer who must find the Holy Ark of the Covenant. The first in the Indiana Jones series, and a distillation of pure, old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment for all the family, directed by a master storyteller who creates an easy and effortless-looking swing for the narrative. Between them, they transformed the self-serving memoirs of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta into stunning cinematic art: a sublime, black-and-white study of LaMotta's desperate battles in and out of the ring, with his brother, his wife, his mob sponsors and of course himself. The artistic high-water mark of Scorsese's career and his remarkable partnership with De Niro. Bowing towards Wim Wenders' great German road movies, it's also a meditation of the state of the nation's cinema, and a memorable, successful attempt to make a genuine British art movie. Perhaps the only British film of the period that captures a sense of the ennui, drift and dejection of the unlamented late 1970s.