Parents' Guide to Ikiru

Remade in 2022 as the English-language Living, this Japanese drama from co-writer and director Akira Kurosawa combines a heartfelt personal story with a more critical look at work and relationships. Starring Kurosawa's frequent collaborator Shimura as meek Tokyo bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, the much acclaimed Ikiru sends its lead character on an unlikely journey to both try to find his place in the world and improve his life and the lives of those in his community. To do this, he must navigate the unfamiliar waters of deciding who he wants to connect with and what is within his power to change. Unafraid to explore the darker side of this quest—from Kanji's initial depression and anxiety about being diagnosed with terminal cancer to others' being unsettled by his unusual behavior—Kurosawa is ruthless in his dissection of 1950s Japanese society. Likewise, he makes the bold decision to tell the story in a non-chronological format, removing any possibility of a conventional ending. Some sections might capture the tediousness of grinding office jobs a little too well, while Kanji's up-and-down relationship with a much younger, female former colleague was finessed for the 2022 remake. But the themes explored here still echo into the future, at a time when different forces, namely technology, threaten to cut us off from the people closest to us.