Rashomon

It may be debatable which is the best Kurosawa film, but this one is my personal favorite. It’s a work of bold, abstract beauty that questions reality by consensus. A rape and murder mystery is told and re-told from different perspectives (we even get a version of the story as told by the spirit of the murdered man, via medium). Each person has a completely different version of what occurred, and the mystery is never really “solved.” We are left doubting that any of the actors were telling the “true” version of what happened. Man is revealed as a creature who’s self-image is guarded jealously against a cold reality, which causes a Monk to nearly despair against the whole of mankind, until, in the midst of the fog in a desolate town in feudal Japan, a glimmer of hope is found.