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100Seibei's story is told by director Yoji Yamada in muted tones and colors, beautifully re-creating a feudal village that still retains its architecture, its customs, its ancient values, even as the economy is making its way of life obsolete.
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100A gorgeous, emotionally rewarding masterpiece that invites compassion, reflection and, at least from this reviewer, a great deal of admiration. It's no wonder that it won 12 Japanese Academy Awards.
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100This is an absolutely brilliant film but in a quiet way.
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91It's wonderful to see a Japanese movie in which a samurai, for all his somber discipline and skill, is also a touching and complicated ordinary man.
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90Perhaps because this is director Yoji Yamada's 77th movie, every aspect of his filmmaking is placidly assured and meaningful.
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90Yamada shoots his movie with a grandfatherly expertise, never squeezing the drama for juice or distancing us too far from the characters -- it's a pleasure to see a movie that makes every shot count, narratively and emotively.
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90Deeply affecting.
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Combines novelistic detail with cinematic sweep.
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89This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.
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88Twilight is a great samurai film in the way that "Unforgiven," "The Gunfighter" or "Will Penny"--all muted, somber films about aging gunfighters--are great westerns.
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88Reflective, touching, intimate portrait of a samurai facing action in his waning years.
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83The pace of this Oscar nominee may be a bit contemplative for audiences seeking "Yojimbo"-style action, but it's surely a more realistic and moving look at life in 19th-century Japan.
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80Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.
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80Welcome to Yoji Yamada. After decades of comedies, he arrives--in this country, at least--with a uniquely touching samurai film. At the age of seventy-three, he starts a new career.
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75Not for those with limited attention spans, though there's never a dull moment.
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75There are a few fight scenes, but they're as unshowy as the rest of this restrained film. If your warrior ideal is Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill," you may not have the patience this gentle story demands of its viewers.
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75The stylish flick harkens back to the work of old masters like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu.
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75Timeless.
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75The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.
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70Although the pace is slow, "Twilight" is a moving account of a family in crisis and the love that provides a short window of happiness for the father.
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70Though it includes a couple of sword fights, Yamada's epic domestic drama could easily be called an anti-samurai film. But its aim is less to subvert the genre's conventions than to deepen them, extending its parameters to include the minutia and rhythms of everyday life.
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70The film is a bit of a slog, but in the end, it's a slog worth taking, thanks to a strange, moving ending that reduces the samurai era's codes of warfare, class, and honor down to two men meeting face to face.
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70The film's septuagenarian director deserves his share of the credit for bringing this human story to the screen with engaging B-movie modesty and no small measure of chops.
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60A mellow, stately, contemplative study of a stoic, brave man, but it doesn't deliver in the action department.
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50Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.
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Positive: 12 out of 13
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Mixed: 0 out of 13
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Negative: 1 out of 13
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10
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EricS.9A little slow at some points but still both fascinating in its portrait of daily life in the samurai era and moving as well. A great film.