Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  "I was once full, but what was inside me is outside now,” A former psychology student obsessed with mesmerism, turned amnesiac gets a series of totally normal and sane people to commit murder simply by confounding them by not answering their questions, talking in circles, smoking a cigarette and asking them "who are you? Tell me about yourself." If this was just a movie about serial murder via hypnotism it wouldn't be one of my all time favorites, but Kurosawa does something far creepier and harder to get a handle on: an epidemiological portrait of the howling void at the center of an entire society and the cauldron of violence simmering beneath the veneer of a compliant politeness. Has one of my favorite last shots in any movie ever.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 3

  A work almost too disquieting: Procedural pushed to obsession pushed to psychosis. Starts as a seeming vision of 90's Tokyo as a city of corpses and interrogation rooms, but even as it does work on sociological levels, (similar to Pulse, Kurosawa uses genre trappings to have us reflect on present spaces and objects) it's a film of the psyche first and foremost. I can't think of a movie that feels more scarring. Even reflections on voyeurism & cinema: by desiring to understand evil we risk getting to close to it, and if we get too close to evil we will become evil. Even as we travese physical spaces we enter psychological ones, like Mamiya's cell or the abandoned house. And when these spaces intercut, even a cup of water is terrifying.

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  Review by Branson Reese

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Early on you’re like “I would never fall for this shit. I would somehow resist it” and then you’re glued to the scene where he spills the water in the doctor’s office and you’re like “ah shit he’d get me in a second. I’d probably even try to squeeze in a second kill before I got caught.”

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½ 11

  As I mentioned with Pulse, one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best traits as a filmmaker is that his presentation of material has a lack of an emphatic expression to it. The shibui nature of his filmic style, as Bordwell suggests, offers us all the narrative information in the frame necessary, but rarely highlights its relative importance. The rigorousness of this formula thus puts an indelible amount of faith in the spectator to become involved in the narrative, finding horror in commonplace frames that don't tell us to find horror.

  Cure's one mistake comes in its initial moments, a murder that happens indifferent to the frame involving a blunt object, ironically scored to kitschy music that feels like something out of the…

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  Review by kailey ★★★★ 20

  choose the word or phrase that doesn't belong in the set

  1. do you remember?
  2. tell me about yourself
  3. i am empty and you are filled with rage
  4. human beings are essentially good

  1. waves
  2. fire
  3. air
  4. paper

  1. a blurred face
  2. blood dripping down a sink
  3. two men dueling in a room
  4. your sanity

  1. a happy marriage
  2. a fulfilling job
  3. a healthy outlook on life
  4. a job that asks you to stare straight in the face of evil and tells you that sometimes the cause is... nothing

  1. you know nothing
  2. you will never know
  3. the world is far vaster and more scary than…

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★★★ 8

  Cure is the manifestation of malaise, it's being in the same room with a serial killer, where each sound made is distinctly registered and every tiny action raises an alarm. Cure is pure evil, it makes us jump at the most insignificant details, the flick of a lighter, the tilt of a glass of water, motions of a mere plastic stirrer, the faint, omnipresent static noise, listen to it, that's our brain trying to shut everything out, a self-defense mechanism against the unknown. Cure is a peaceful death under calm, unwavering hands, violence stripped of impact, blood detached from reality, while the musicians forgot to do their job and the camera unflinchingly stared ahead -- but still -- the sight…

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  we all just want a mysterious quiet man in a calming sweater to tell us it's ok to want to murder people and give us permission to lose our minds

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  Review by Hungkat ★★★★★ 4

  Kurosawa does for sweaters, cigarette lighters, water, papers, wind, people, room corners, and liminal spaces what Jaws did for the sea.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 11

  You have to be one of two things to be able to portray psychopathy in cinema as chillingly well as Kurosawa does: a psychopath yourself, or a master of the craft.

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  Review by Adam Nayman ★★★★★ 2

  The killer in me is the killer in you

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  Review by KYK ★★★★½ 2

  everything about this movie feels so off -- like when you have a single strand of hair down your shirt and it's vaguely itchy but you can't quite place the sensation. it's brilliant. from the first murder to the faint club music (?!) during the interrogation scene, right down to the colors! i didn't realize kurosawa explicitly stated SE7EN as an influence but i was thinking of fincher's greens (and to a degree, james wan's greens, which look like fincher's hand-me-downs) while watching this movie, admiring how kurosawa instead went for the feel-good mint green when nothing about this movie is feel-good.

  also this was cool as hell.

  35mm. Japan Society.

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  Review by Christina ★★★★½ 3

  venting to murder suspects about how much of a drag your sick wife is > therapy