5) Ran
Based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ran is in some ways the film Akira Kurosawa had been preparing for his whole career. He’d been literally gearing up to make it since the 70s, in the meantime drawing up immensely detailed storyboards for the beauteous and vibrantly colorful battle sequences, but this was also the Japanese maestro’s biggest movie ever. It took his years of directing on (relatively) smaller jidaigeki movies for him to amass the experience to make something of this size.
As he had with his previous Shakespeare adaptations, Kurosawa mostly throws the dialogue out and comes up with his own, while remaining faithful to the basic story of the source. It leaves him with a timeless epic tale as a template and room to layer it in lavish decoration – which he does, profusely. The result is probably the most visually resplendent film of Kurosawa’s career, and one of the best-looking samurai movies ever made.