Enough with the good schlock, back to serious cinema. Ikiru is a masterful film by Akira Kurosawa.
Many film critics argue that Kurosawa's greatest films were his historical epics. While I've only watched about a third of the man's output, and while Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Kagemusha are certainly terrific films, Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well, and High And Low, are even better.
The reason is that Kurosawa understood modern man better. Sometimes, even in his greatest historical films, characters would lapse into stereotypes, such as the hero, the villain, the anti-hero, and not converse nor relate to each other easily and naturally. That has never been a problem in the films I've seen of his set in 20th Century Japan.
Here is a trailer for Ikiru:
