Critics reviews

Directing “Cloud” with sometimes over-deliberate pacing of its superb tension and suspense, Kurosawa crafts a deceptive air of normality... [The director] leaves little room for hope in humanity, but his biggest provocation is the grace note of ambiguity he tacks onto Yoshii’s fate.

The way this all comes crashing down in a vengeance-fueled slow-motion gun battle could seem like a radical change of pace. But Kurosawa’s slow, patient direction throws just enough stones into the stagnant waters of Ryosuke’s life to make the vengeance of those he has harmed seem almost justified.

A nail-biting [journey]... To view “Cloud” as mere commentary on 21st-century greed is to miss the existential nightmare that Yoshii’s armed, bloodthirsty and mostly hapless pursuers represent: regular folk driven to kill after a humiliating experience. And who are they gunning for? Someone just as pathetic. Game on.

This is more “Reservoir Dogs” than “Ringu.” But whatever box one wants to place [Cloud] in, it’s a reminder of Kurosawa’s remarkable skill with pacing and plotting, delivering a brisk film that leaves one pondering its themes, especially what it means to live in an era when nothing is real.

There’s a unique thrill to watching “Cloud” shift from a sedate internet crime saga and into a frenetic manhunt (alternately funny and frightening)... [Kurosawa's] action choreography is hyper-lucid in its crudeness, the sociopathy he diagrams is fantastically kinetic in its own respect, and Yoshii’s ultimate fate when the dust settles is rewarding in a way that you will never see coming.

The savagery on display should be terrifying, but in a world where humans are so divorced from their actions, everything feels plastic, random, pointless. This will surely lose some viewers, even though it’s often the charm of Kurosawa’s work.

Mesmerizing... Even amid the loud, incessant pop of gunfire, Kurosawa avoids monotony; he has a knack for embedding ideas within action, and for developing action in ways that trigger yet more ideas.

“Cloud” is a strange, unnerving story of a man whose life online catches up with him in the real world... [a film with an] odd mix of moods—suspenseful, comic, even dreamlike.

It’s a surprisingly funny film in that way, but also disturbing. For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us.

Cloud is a masterful, paranoia-inducing action-thriller with a horror maestro’s touch, filled with great performances, terrifying scares, and a finale that will linger in your mind long after it’s over.

As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age.

Cloud [is] a swirl of horror, comedy, action, and social-commentary drama that amalgamates [Kurosawa's] prior works and yet is also like nothing else in recent memory.