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Kurosawa's film is heavyweight fare: disturbing, slightly over the top, but satisfying, like a rich meal with a powerful aftertaste.
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100Turns out to be one of the most compelling, finely orchestrated and oddly enchanting films of the year so far.
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91Known for distinctive horror movies like "Cure" and "Pulse," inventive Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds just the right melancholy tone to suit a new and all too familiar kind of horror: economic downsizing.
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90A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.
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90Bold, acutely observant and universal in its wide-ranging concerns and implications.
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88No, it doesn't turn into another horror film or a murder-suicide. It simply shows how lives torn apart by financial emergencies can be revealed as being damaged all along.
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88Each performance in this plaintive work is superb, but Kyoko Koizumi's gently melancholy portrait of the businessman's wife keeps Tokyo Sonata true and affecting, even when the later passages go a little nuts.
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88An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.
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83As always, Kurosawa masterfully controls his film's framing and sound design, and as always, the painstakingly precise mise-en-scene can feel a little overdone at times.
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80With Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa shows that he has quite the flair for dry humor and peppers this film with just the perfect amount.
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Kurosawa's abiding concern has always been the alienation of modern living, which he here merely transplants into a more recognizable domestic milieu, where subtle fissures in society's apparent order threaten to short-circuit people instead of their beloved technology.
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80Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama -- if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair -- there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.
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80At its best, Tokyo Sonata is a deft interweaving of seemingly dissonant ideas -- war and music, family and politics, authority and freedom.
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75Although envisioned before the world economy went to hell, Tokyo Sonata is relevant to the mess we're in now.
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75Tokyo Sonata, in so many senses, is about an allergic reaction to the very idea of what it means to be Japanese. The characters misplace their belief in etiquette, politesse, dignity, and propriety - or they struggle to maintain it.
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75A disconcerting melange, Tokyo Sonata begins rather conventionally before spinning into black comic, almost fantastical, terrain.
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Thanks to the script which invests the smallest scenes with dramatic significance, Tokyo Sonata enthrals audiences for the first hour with the pacing of a thriller.
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70Though there's nothing here that hasn't been dealt with in other Japanese movies, picture benefits considerably from its pitch-perfect performances.
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70For all its oddities, this movie does carry weight, and, with more than eight per cent of Americans out of work, the timing of its release here could not be more acute.
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70Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa switches gears from supernatural horror to poignant social satire.
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67Only in the slightly overlong last act, as the family's misfortunes become truly existential, does director Kiyoshi Kurosawa take things to another level. Whether this is an extension of the film's social criticism, a comment on the absurdity of melodrama or straightforward audience manipulation, is anyone's guess.
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60Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is better known for horror films; this is a movie where the horror is internalized, and hideously truthful.
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