Restored Asian Films

The aged lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) hands power to his eldest son, at the same time banishing the youngest, the only one to speak honestly to him. Betrayal is piled on betrayal as the eldest sons turn against the old man, relentlessly spurred on by Kaede (Mieko Harada), malevolent, viperish wife of the new ruler.
Moments of poetic delicacy – the youngest son cutting boughs of blossoms to make an arbour to shade his father as he dozes under a soundtrack of glorious birdsong – give way to sequences of battle so intense and violent that they beggar the imagination. The first battle – one of the most impressive in Kurosawa’s entire oeuvre – opens after Hidetora says the words “We are in hell” at the one-hour mark. All direct sound drops out and Tôru Takemitsu’s Mahler-inflected score takes over, rising and falling over exquisitely edited images of repeated arrow-showers, hundreds of soldiers with colour-coded uniforms and banners rushing headlong back and forth, corpses by the dozen, blood everywhere, the murder of six concubines by gunfire, and finally the burning of the castle to the ground, with the old lord slowly going catatonic amidst all the mayhem. It is a staggering six minutes of cinema, reminiscent of Bruegel’s great painting The Suicide Of Saul, whose titular event occurs off-centre, almost unacknowledged, as giant armies of ant-like soldiers swarm over the rest of the painting.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/28/akira-kurosawa-king-lear-story-ran-4k-restoration