It’s hard to believe it now, but in the 1970s, the acclaimed master director of films like Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Ikiru, Yojimbo, and High and Low was facing the end of his career. Unable to secure financing and in poor health, he attempted suicide in 1971 at the age of 61. But after the success of Star Wars in 1977, George Lucas sought out a meeting with the nearly 70-year-old Kurosawa. Lucas used his newfound clout with 20th Century Fox to get Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980), a visual and thematic trial run for Ran, produced. After Kagemusha’s success, Kurosawa finally got to make Ran, a beautiful and apocalyptic retelling of William Shakespeare’s King Lear.

As much of a “sex movie” as The Shining was a “haunted house movie,” this strange, haunting film was overshadowed at the time by rumors concerning on-set turmoil (a 400-day shoot, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s marriage, Harvey Keitel’s sudden and mysterious exit from the production) as well as the supposedly shocking sexual content and Kubrick’s death shortly before its release. And yet the result is a dream-logic parable about marriage and fidelity  —  albeit with a disturbing undercurrent involving the twisted sexuality of our ruling class. Its reputation has only improved, thanks to the online speculation about Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death.

Sure, the computer-generated de-aging looks fake, but who cares? This story about Jimmy Hoffa’s possible assassin is really an ode to the postwar prosperity of the average working stiff made possible by the Teamsters, and all the sharp elbows they might have thrown to ensure that prosperity. The film makes a good case that America has always been best understood as a semicriminal enterprise.