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 chjase to the phone call is as good as the best stuff Kurosawa has ever done and everything else is equally compelling. The earth tembles 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 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 matt lynch ★★★½

  Sadly the goat was sent to Jurassic Park.

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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 Stephen M ★★★★½

  I am finding J-horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa's recent dramatic films to be equally good. This one about a Japanese TV crew filming a cheesy travel show in Uzbekistan quite fascinating, touching on themes of loneliness, culture clashes, sexism, alienation and rediscovery. It has a rambling narrative but comes together in a lovely way in the second and third acts.

  Yoko (played by J-pop singer Atsuko Maeda) is the reporter for a you-are-there travel show that chose a country that she and the crew know little about. She's the only woman and the men (except for the translator) pretty much ignore her except as when she's being filmed. She's lonely and very much lost,  wandering around the city when she's not…

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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 Jay D 's Watching ★★★★

  A very gentle, but very wise and sometimes sad film from Kiyoshi Kurosawa -out of his other work I've seen, this felt in some ways like a companion piece to BRIGHT FUTURE (albeit with a goat instead of jellyfish) but it's also very much its own thing - a travelogue, a character study, an anti-horror film where we're always waiting for the worst to happen, and a reflection on life, and luck, and connections. I wasn't familiar with the somewhat fraught history between Japan and Uzbekistan before watching the film, and it does add a certain thematic element to it, but this is also a film that one can focus on as about the demands of keeping an interior life…

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  Review by Sam C. Mac ★★★★

  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 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…

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  Review by Eduardo Valente

  Such freedom and "don't-give-a-fuckness", as usual with Kyioshi. Always keeps you guessing about where it's going, without ever making an effort. It's just how he flows, I guess.

  In a way, it's as if "Lost in Translation" had its "Letters from Iwo Jima" version - except that by a Japanese filmmaker of course, which makes all the difference.

  The fantastic in Kyioshi always comes from within, and his non-genre works make it as clear as possible. The depths of the human soul, the difficulties in sharing a world with others while each one inhabit their own personal universe. And have I mentioned the freedom?