Popular reviews

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 3

  I adore those Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies that despite not being proper genre films draw on his horror background for their aesthetic strategies. To the Ends of the Earth is about, like most horror movies to some extant, the unknown and everything about it is about how Maeda negotiates with a world outside her own. It starts a standard sense of alienation and director and actress combine to push it in so many directions. To the Ends of the Earth has a lot in common with Kurosawa and Maeda first film in a foreign land, The Seventh Code, but that film was more overt in how it was using fiction to modulate her relationship to that strange space. The entire sequence that goes from the chase to the phone call is as good as the best stuff Kurosawa has ever done and everything else is equally compelling. The earth trembles here.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★

  Perhaps slight to some - and perhaps that is dependant on how much you find yourself relating to the protagonist, Yoko - it's nevertheless undeniable to me that this is basically a total, genre-shapeshifting masterclass in modern narrative direction, perhaps surprising to some given K. Kurosawa's reputation as a great classicalist. That hasn't really changed here, but what's most impressive is that the film is a series of "non-events" - virtually nothing actually "happens" in this movie. In the meantime, Kurosawa takes all the techniques he's mastered in his genre work and applies them to everyday anxieties, and it's this mastery of technique which brings me to one of the things I admire most about his films - you're never…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★

  Kiyoshi Kurosawa's To the Ends of the Earth isn't a horror film but it feels like one. It's about a woman in an unsafe place, stuck in a country she doesn't understand. There's a creeping sense of being unwanted, as if being in a crowd is the loneliest thing ever. The atmosphere of To the Ends of the Earth is therefore oppressive.

  What To the Ends of the Earth manages to do so well is undermine our own perceptions. It is openly about reality TV and the fact that it's all a presentation. The way the cinematography alternates between being televisual and cinematic also emphasises this. The lead character is also a performer - singing, presenting, masking herself. Yet despite…

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  Review by betty ★★★★★ 2

  as grotesque as one would expect from kiyoshi; yet nearly impossible to place alongside the rest of his work. all at once it captures all these different ways of seeing; operating in a realm of heightened emotions where scenes are arranged with almost overwhelmingly intense precision, only to be reconstructed via an abstraction or schema brought about from the viewer's perspective... very much "of the now" and still maintaining a deep connection with the best of the best.

  Renoir's mise-en-scène has the same quality of revealing detail without detaching it from its context. If Renoir uses a deep-focus style in Madame Bovary, it is to imitate the subtle way in which nature conceals the relationship between its effects; if he…

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  Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ 5

  Okku, the free goat, not eaten by wild dogs at last. The beauty and dangers of the sea, the myth of the sky, the emotions of a song that leaves the theater and arrives at the mountains. God brings together those who love each other.

  There is a scene in Sang-soo’s ‘In Another Country’ where Huppert talks to a goat using his language. They don’t really speak the same language, but they talked to each other either way. Freedom lies beyond denotation.

  Crítica em português no meu blog.

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★½

  Apesar deste novo filme de Kiyoshi Kurosawa não possuir um tom sobrenatural explícito, fica evidente que, ao longo história, existe uma mística implícita na trajetória da protagonista.

  Na medida em que Yoko, a personagem de Atsuko Maeda, vai passando por diversas provações ao longo da sua viagem no Uzbequistão, na medida em que ela vai absorvendo um sofrimento emocional durante esse trajeto, ela também passa a construir uma nova relação intuitiva com o espaço ao seu redor.

  Existe uma jornada mística bastante clara nesse sentido. Uma jornada que começa com um sofrimento pontuado por diferentes situações de incômodo durante o seu trabalho como jornalista, passa por uma literal perseguição por agentes da lei e culmina em sutis novos estados de…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  Sadly the goat was sent to Jurassic Park.

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  Review by Evan Morgan ★★★★½ 1

  Part of InRO’s first round-up for TIFF 2019:

  Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested by opposing modes, genres, and moods. To the Ends of the Earth begins as a kind of travel film, or more precisely, as a document of a TV crew failing to produce one: The host, Yoko (Japanese pop singer Atsuko Maeda, now a regular Kurosawa collaborator), can’t muster the pep required to perform her role as world ambassador for audiences back home, who are conditioned to believe that foreign lands uniformly provoke wonderment and irrepressible perkiness, when in fact disappointment…

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  Review by PlaguDocta ★★★★★ 2

  Don't you know it's gonna be alright? Though mysterious Kiyoshi Kurosawa qualities remain. The familiar room geographies with a cultural connection were in repetition. Away with words. There was anxiousness and then there was reassurance. Or when the animals became apart of the mountain. Post-rock classical.

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  Review by samcmac ★★★★

  Since Yoko herself doesn’t speak the language, Kurosawa chooses not to subtitle the Uzbek dialogue spoken throughout To the Ends of the Earth, and this decision, combined with the use of a filmic grammar that often feels ported over from the director’s horror films (dramatic lighting, wide frames that emphasize an individual’s feelings of alienation, and eerie silences), serves to envelop us in the psychological space of a young woman whose emotional engagement with a foreign culture, as well as her careerist ambitions and her ability to be open with those around her, are subject to ingrained fears and anxieties.

  Review for Slant Magazine.

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  Review by Chris ★★★★

  Social alienation plagues reporter Yoko as she's sent to journey around Uzbekistan for her lightweight TV show; any expectation that a sense of freedom can be attained in a foreign land proves futile when each wonder discovered is shrouded in apathy or uncertainty, resulting in her slipping further into dissociation. She cannot shake the existential fear that she's a stranger in her own mind, unable to discern who she really is or if she'll ever find a place to belong. Isolation closes in from all sides: treated like an object by her crew, regarded as a peculiarity by the local populace and separated from those back home by thousands of miles. The crowded streets and idyllic landscapes she wanders appear…

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  Review by Lawrence Garcia ★★★★

  Had the pleasure of interviewing Kurosawa over at MUBI Notebook. As Evan Morgan has before noted, Kurosawa is one of only a few working directors who would absolutely flourish in a classic studio system, and the fact that he considers himself "not so much as an artist, but... an artisan" (a fairly astonishing statement from such an accomplished director) seems to bear out that observation. All-too-brief introduction excerpted below:

  Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a masterful film—all the more so for being masterful in the most unassuming of ways. The film originated as a commission to commemorate diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan, and to that end, it incorporates a number of the landlocked nation's various…