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Sansho the Bailiff

Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff)

1954

Kenji Mizoguchi

Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayaki, Kyôko Kagawa, Eitarô Shindô ...

8.3

6,139

Drama 'Sansho Dayu' reaches back to a Japanese folk tale of the 12th century to depict the barbarism of a dark age, when people didn't know how to be human. When a provincial governor's attempts to protect the rights of regional farmers clash with the goals of the feudal regime, he's sent into exile, and forced to leave his family behind. A few years later his wife and children begin a long journey to reunite with him, only to be waylaid be ... [+]

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Derek Adams Time Out	"A film that is both impassioned and elegiac, dynamic in its sense of the social struggle and the moral options, and yet also achingly remote in its fragile beauty"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"One of the best of all Japanese films (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Roger Greenspun The New York Times	"A film of breathtaking visual beauty (...) Its impulses (...) follow an esthetic program that is also a moral progression, and that emerges, with superb lucidity, only from the greatest art."	POS
United Kingdom	David Parkinson Empire	"Moving and atmospheric, this quest tale is among the best of its kind (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Telegraph	"[Its] fluid, breathtakingly beautiful style combines magnificently conceived tracking shots with compositions of tremendous stillness, and passages of intensely choreographed emotional violence with tender moments of silence"	POS
United States	Chuck Bowen Slant	"'Sansho the Bailiff' is one of those exquisite masterpieces that testifies to the nourishing value of simplicity in the face of incomprehensible atrocity (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"In 1954 (...) the film's thematic resonance was unmistakable, a powerful rebuke to the tyrannies of the recent past."	POS

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