Cinema: The Lesson of the Master Ran

An old man, a great and brutal warrior in his day and now the monarch of all he surveys from the windswept hilltop where his hunting party has paused to rest, announces a plan he has long contemplated. It is time, he says, to renounce his power. He will divide his holdings among his three children and appoint the eldest head of his house. The youngest, the one who loves him most selflessly, resists the idea and is angrily banished from the realm. By the time the ensuing tragedy has played out, the patriarch is a madman wandering the wilderness, all...