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Onibaba

1964

Kaneto Shindô

Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Sato, Taiji Tonoyama ...

7.7

4,061

Drama. Fantasy. Horror After enlisting as a volunteer in a war in 14th century Japan, his wife and mother remain living in a swamp. They eke out their living by ambushing worn-out warriors, killing them and selling their belongings to a greedy merchant. The woman comes to mistrust her daughter-in-law who has coupled up with a deserter, and begins to wear a facial mask she has taken from a slain samurai. Soon the mask will not come off again. In this disguise ... [+]

	Author	Review
Canada	Shelagh Rowan-Legg Screen Anarchy	"Shindô's work has never been as well known to many cinephiles and even casual film fans, and that really needs to be rectified. 'Onibaba' is a stand-out in his oeuvre"	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"'Onibaba' is a chilling movie, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome, and filmed in a colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness"	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"No masterpiece by any means, it's at times overplayed, but it's striking visually, handling swift horizontal movement very well. It's also genuinely erotic"	POS
United States	A.H. Weiler The New York Times	"Although his artistic integrity remains untarnished, his driven rustic principals are exotic, sometimes grotesque figures out of medieval Japan, to whom a Westerner finds it hard to relate (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 5)"	NEU
United States	TV Guide	"One of the absolute peaks of atmospheric black-and-white horror (...) Dark, bleak, and decadent, the screenplay is dripping with depravity and sexual heat"	POS
United States	Budd Wilkins Slant	"A ferocious yet strikingly poetic examination of the human instinct for survival against all odds, cloaked in the guise of a moody monochrome ghost story (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

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