"They don't make them like Akira Kurosawa's magisterial "Ran" anymore, but the truth is, they didn't really make them like this regal epic back then either. " 
– Kenneth Turan, LA Times

“SPECTACULAR! Among the most thrilling movie experiences a viewer can have!&rdquo
– Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times

“CRITICS' PICK! KUROSAWA'S MAGISTERIAL EPIC DEMANDS VIEWING ON THE BIG SCREEN!”
– Time Out New York

“Kurosawa’s late-period masterpiece, transposing King Lear to period Japan, is one of the most exquisite spectacles ever made, a color-coordinated epic tragedy of carnage and betrayal—passionate, somber, and profound.”
– New York Magazine

“AWE INSPIRING! Takes its place among the major screen versions of Shakespeare. The battle scenes are horrifying, yet extraordinarily beautiful.”
– Elliott Stein, The Village Voice

“The most intimate of epics or the most epic of chamber pieces.”
– The L Magazine

“Spectacular... The wide-screen, color-coordinated battle scenes will blow your mind, and must be seen in a theater. Don't ever think of watching Ran on a DVD or cellphone!”
– V.A. Musetto, New York Post

“KUROSAWA'S SPECTACLE TO END ALL SWEEPING J-SPECTACLES! Like all of Kurosawa’s work, the human pulse is what drives the drama. Only this time, it’s also the drumbeat of an elegy.”
– Time Out New York

“Kurosawa's Mount Fuji of a Film!” – LA Weekly

“More than the brilliant set pieces (the first big battle scene, an orgy of bloodletting played in almost total silence)
or the stunning images (a single figure in a sea of grass and rock; a battalion on horseback galloping along the shore,
their herky-jerky movement the effect of shooting with an ultra-long lens), it’s the shapeliness of the whole that impresses, as if Kurosawa had held the entire 160 minutes, like a painting, in his mind’s eye.”
– Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

“A Lear for our age, and for all time. The shift and sway of a nation divided is vast, the chaos terrible, the battle scenes the most ghastly ever filmed, and the outcome is even bleaker than Shakespeare’s. Indeed the only note of optimism resides in the nobility of the film itself: a huge, tormented canvas, in which Kurosawa even contrives to command the elements to obey his vision. The results are all that one could possibly dream of.”
– Time Out (London)

“A tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic… a film that shows human brutality, warfare,
and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God, seated far above the world’s terror. … a great metaphor of the apocalypse, a world in flames whose chaos is made strangely beautiful.”
– Michael Wilmington