Ikiru

Ikiru follows Kanji Watanabe, a longtime civil servant in a Tokyo municipal office whose days are an unchanging routine of paperwork and passing responsibility along. When he learns he has terminal cancer, the life he has led and the distance between him and his son force him to confront the emptiness of his existence. Searching for something to justify the years he has spent, he settles on a modest goal: turning a squalid vacant lot in a working-class neighborhood into a playground for local children. What follows is a struggle through a bureaucracy determined to deflect and delay, one he pursues despite the indifference of his family and colleagues.

Akira Kurosawa directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, with Sōjirō Motoki producing for TOHO. It is the seventh of the twenty-three films Kurosawa directed, arriving between Scandal and Seven Samurai. Takashi Shimura leads a credited cast of sixty-two as Watanabe, with Nobuo Kaneko as his son Mitsuo, Miki Odagiri as Toyo, and Bokuzen Hidari, Haruo Tanaka and Shinichi Himori among the supporting players.

The film holds a rating of 8.3 on IMDb from roughly 102,000 votes and 8.3 on TMDB from a smaller pool of about 1,400, while a critics' rating stands at 9.1 from 57 reviews, so critical assessments run higher than the strong audience scores.