Popular reviews

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  Review by iana ★★★★½

  this is, for lack of a better word, so dreamy and majestically beautiful. even with some of the harsher sequences, there’s a real tenderness to creating something that resonates.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  In high school, I took a psychology course during which I learned, erroneously or not, that dreams are just random images fired off by your brain. Some meaning is attached to them, but it's largely after the fact. After learning this, I more or less stop being interested in them. Any value they had as insights to my life were basically negated by the fact that dreams were entirely random. Other people's dreams became especially dull to me. "Oh, I had the weirdest dream..." essentially means "Oh, I had a perfectly normal dream." Yeah, I'm kinda a jerk. But I just don't tend to find discussions of actual dreams very interesting. (Fictional dreams, especially prophetic visions and whatnot, are fine,…

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  Review by Bruno ★★★★ 8

  Through Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams you notice a profound reflection of the director’s ideals and values he had during his life. This is probably his most experimental work and adding all the hallucinatory sequences, surrealism, post-apocalyptic visions and an exuberant display of nature really helped enhancing the whole experience to a whole other level. While some of the dreams might be more enticing to watch than others, they all have a deep significance attached to them. At the end of the day, this is a fascinating celebration of life and death that will certainly stick with you.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 4

  Dreams is a unique concept for a film, consisting entirely of short films inspired by Akira Kurosawa's recurring dreams. It is unlike anything else in his filmography and pure surreal arthouse. The images are beautiful and abstract, the storytelling often formless and wordless but forever hypnotic. All the sections are interesting in their own way, but the dreamy and slow presentation makes for something much more. Whilst Dreams is somewhat like Dodes'ka-den in having multiple stories, it is all structured and separated clearly here.

  There is much speculation as to how this jigsaw fits into Kurosawa's personal life. What do these dreams tell us about Kurosawa's mind? Nothing really, or rather no more than our own dreams do. Each dream…

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  Review by Nick ★★★½ 4

  As an Akira Kurosawa fantasy that deals with the concept of dream, Dreams feels ultra simplistic and overbearingly didactic for its overstretched runtime of nearly 2 hours. Thankfully it has breathtaking visuals and Kurosawa's name attached to it to save itself from being a total self-righteous drag.

  Comprised of multiple segments of Kurosawa's bizarre dreams throughout his life, Dreams never dives deep enough into the bone-chilling realm occupied by the Lynchian classics. Instead it barely scratches the surface, with a single-minded resolve to force-feed the audience with the importance of environmental protection. Almost every segment is dedicated to such cause, promoting the harmony between human and nature via Kurosawa's twisted yet somehow cliched dreamworld of ghosts, fairies or simply apocalyptic…

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  Review by Esther Rosenfield

  Maybe the best use of color I've ever seen in a film???? To everyone who deceived me into thinking this was lesser Kurosawa, hang your heads in shame.

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  Review by Zegan ★★★★½

  I really wish Akira Kurosawa directs my dreams too

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  Review by PopcornIdeology ★★★★½ 1

  I’ve also had a wet dream where Martin Scorsese was Vincent Van Gogh, very cool Kurosawa.

  I’ve always been fascinated with the depiction of dreams in film. Awhile back I labeled film as the truest form of expression and dreams as the purest form of escapism and the rawest look at the internal psyche. So I think when brought together human expression and desire are perfectly molded into an artistic interpretation of the human condition. Kurosawa’s Dreams takes this idea even further by depicting multiple dreams, not connected by narrative but rather bound together strongly by tone, themes, and atmosphere.

  The worlds present in Dreams are often fantastical landscapes perfectly accentuated with exuberant colors, meticulous and precise framing, and a…

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★½ 1

  Criterion Collection Spine #842
  (Foreign language film)

  (Adam & Justin's Letterboxd Movie Club)

  How about a glimpse into the vivid dreamscape of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa ... YES PLEASE!

  "I had another Dream."

  Dreams is definitely the most unconventional of Kurosawa's movies that I have seen, since it is an anthology film divided into eight parts. Each segment features some stunning visuals which were inspired by the Director's dreams, thoughts on nature/humanity, and Japanese folklore. While the colorful images and traditions were fascinating to watch, at times the lengthy dialogue felt like Kurosawa was lecturing us, which tended to drag down the pacing.

  Overall it was cool to see Kurosawa present this short subject style of filmmaking, compared to the sprawling…

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  Review by chavel ★★★★ 7

  Based on the dreams of Akira Kurosawa

  Sometimes a dream has a story and sometimes thoughts just float around and there is no story. Akira Kurosawa lets us know that sometimes an image itself tells the story and it can branch off into a thousand thoughts.

  His eight-vignette work alternates between visions of madness or tranquility, it takes us in waves. The segment that garners the most attention is the one where Martin Scorsese fills in as an actor; indeed there is an emphatic obsessive quality in how he plays Vincent Van Gogh, it's endearing. Yet to watch Dreams again is to realize when Kurosawa is out in the wild, that is where he finds his most exquisite inspiration.

  Dreams…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★½ 10

  The subconscious mind has always been a subject of personal fascination. Dreams, in particular, are very significant to me because I believe they signify something important either in or beyond our control in life. They are trying to tell us something. It’s our job to figure out what. For this reason, I decided I would finally begin my journey into Akira Kurosawa’s mammoth filmography with one of his later and more profoundly artistic works, Dreams. Told through a series of vignettes based on the real dreams of the director, the film is an anthology of sorts. Dealing mostly in themes such as mankind’s relationship with nature, spirituality and our fellow man, as well as childhood, death and art. There is no way to…

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  Review by sofie ᱬ

  akira kurosawa really said fuck it and made his dreams come true what a legend