Akira Kurosawa’s greatest film (1952) tells of a man (Takashi Shimura) who finds that he has terminal cancer and spends his remaining months building a playground in a poor section of the city. It avoids all the maudlin cliches and blind alleys of examining the “meaning of life,” giving us instead a rare portrait of a man experiencing a genuine insight into what his wasted years have been leading to. In Japanese with subtitles.