A beautiful heart warming story of life, death and peace. Kurosawa is undoubtedly the greatest director ever and Shimura's Mr. Watanabe is probably my most favourite cinema character of all time. This is one of the greatest films ever made!
Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki
Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing of significance. After discovering he is suffering from a ...( read more
)
DVD Release Date: January 6, 2004
Stats: 1,179 reviews
Your Rating
Flixster Reviews (1,179)
-
October 1, 2009
-
December 19, 2008
Akira Kurosawa's brilliant 1952 film Ikiru (meaning "to live" in english) is one of the most important and moving essays on what it means to be truly alive. The film is one in a series of Kurosawa masterpieces made between 1952 and 1963, considered to be the filmmaker's richest p...( read more)
-
June 29, 2008
Films don't come much better than this. Ikiru, which means "To Live" in Japanese, is the story of a city employee who after 30 years on the job, never having missed a day of work, finds out he has cancer and has less than a year to live. As he starts to evaluate his life, he re...( read more)
-
May 21, 2008
A highly humanistic and sympathetic film, Ikiru endeavours to shine light on the dark recesses of a modernising world - the corporate sector. The mundanity of work and it's ability to strip us of a real sense of purpose in life is explored as a pinhole in the grander notion of ou...( read more)
-
November 17, 2009
A movie praises idealism and dedicated lives for others...The story of man got 6 months left to live and his efforts for making his last 6 months meaningful. An epic masterpiece.
-
September 29, 2009
Seen this movie, make me think in all the movies that have been inspired by Kurosawa.
Critic Reviews
I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently. full review
Comments
Critic ratings and reviews powered by RottenTomatoes.com
Fresh (60% or more critics rated the movie positively)
Rotten (59% or fewer critics rated the movie positively)
All Rotten Tomatoes content is used under license from Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes, Certified Fresh, and the Tomatometer are the trademarks of Incfusion Corporation, d/b/a Rotten Tomatoes, a subsidiary of IGN Entertainment, Inc.












