Tony Rayns

"[Its] careful stylisation enables Fassbinder to balance between parody of an emotional stance and intense commitment to it"  

"A movie that tries a little too hard for the midnight-show market while neglecting the dynamics of its own warped story-arc."  

"Made for peanuts and shot on DV, this phenomenally provocative film may well turn out to be Miike's masterpiece"  

"This is a reasonably amiable comedy-drama with a strong streak of sentimentality. It falls a long way short of Wayne Wang's Chinatown movies."  

"Despite an incomprehensibly complex back-story, this is the most interesting animation feature from Japan since 'Memories' (...) Fine work from all the animators and voice actors, but the key talent is writer Mamoru Oshii."  

"A mix of stubborn pig-headedness, blatant prejudices, committed violence, and hard, self-deprecatory humour. It's also superbly paced."  

"Shot and cut in the distinctive Kitano style, the film has great spontaneity. The comedy elements bring the author's two personae (...) closer together than ever before (…) Rating: ***** (out of 5)"  

"Welles turned the limitations into strengths (...) This is Shakespeare filmed with love and powerhouse enthusiasm, never with reverence (...) A very great film noir."  

"Touching, intense, sometimes unexpectedly amusing, sometimes agonising, and always achingly sincere."  

"Ludicrously contrived incidents are garnished with desultory dialogue (...) The average tourist with a camcorder would see the city more clearly than this."  

"It's well enough acted and directed to advance Kurosawa's claim to be taken as an important new voice in Japanese cinema."  

"The problem is very basic: theatrical symbolism just isn't the same as filmic realism"  

"Excruciatingly embarrassing at the time, it now looks grotesquely pretentious and pathetically out of touch with the realities of the life-styles that it purports to represent."  

"Anyone disenchanted with the vacuity of later Antonioni will find the seeds of their dissatisfaction well-rooted in the mannerism and facile anguish evident here."

"It is a compendium of four ghost stories adapted from Lafcadio Hearn, so determinedly aesthetic in their design and style that horror frissons hardly get a look in. Very beautiful, though."  

"The result is neither as minatory nor as moving as it thinks it is, despite some arresting surrealist images and the performance of Makharadze as Varlam."  

"The highly nuanced portraits of men and a woman caught between the codes they live by and their deepest, secret impulses, remain very moving and 100 per cent modern."  

"The film is certainly a mess at one level, with damaging fluctuations in tone and pace, and some ropey supporting performances, but it remains enough of a visual triumph to earn its place in the series of Dietrich movies."  

"A very Langian picture of the dangerous undercurrents in emotional relationships, excellently acted by the three principals."

"All confrontations duly occur (...) at a length that exceeds all obvious expectation - and thus begins to reach areas that conventional movies don't touch."