Critics reviews

[Kim Ki-duk's] crowning achievement and an essential piece of South Korean cinema... The story is beautifully carried by the performances, as well as the assured direction, both of which let the scenes develop at their own pace, organically flowing from one moment to the next.

There are flashes of authentic visual poetry, mostly involving Chinese calligraphy, but there's no coherent meaning and the attitude to women is as screwed-up as ever. A 'meditative' experience for the dumbed-down.

Rarely has a movie this simple moved me this deeply... [The film] is Buddhist, but it is also universal... We fall easily into its premise. We are moved and comforted by its story of timelessness, of the transcendence of the eternal.

The film unravels as a kind of Buddhist parable for children. Elementary, perhaps, but profoundly moving... The filmmaker’s reverence for silence and movement inspires as much awe as his locale.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring is an entrancing fable about learning, suffering and the passing on of wisdom... [It] is visually beautiful, spiritually austere and deeply involving... This film might well become some sort of classic.

Although not as gut-wrenching or politically pugnacious as some of his previous work, Kim's film allows a sense of moral renewal unclouded by sentimentality and without blurring his remarkable cinematic idiom.

[A] delightful, meditative film... It is both serene and gripping, and carries a potent and mysterious charge in its visual poetry... This is one of the very few films which has a real spiritual dimension; it bears that dimension lightly, and persuasively transmits a Buddhist conviction that time, age and youth are an illusion. A charming and rewarding film.

[Kim Ki-Duk] impressively fuses style and content. He doesn't judge the actions of his characters or rely on Buddhist sermonising to convey the film's ideas. Instead he achieves a sense of serenity through ravishing images of nature, contemplative pacing and the elegance of his storytelling, without losing sight of the burdens of our existence.

''Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring'' is an exquisitely simple movie... The story, effortlessly joining the cycle of the seasons to the larger rhythms of the life cycle, has a beguiling perfection... [The film] seems less a modern work of art than a solid, ancient object that has always been there, waiting to be found.

A masterpiece of minimalism... Most magnificently, by focusing so simply but so obsessively on the natural world, [the film] attends to what the great German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer called the true vocation of the cinema: the redemption of physical reality. After seeing this film, you will be changed. It is not to be missed.

[The film's] major accomplishment is that it deals with abstract ideas, in what for most auds will be an exotic setting, without exoticizing its subject or setting, or boring the audience into a Zen-like stupor... The result is never less than engrossing viewing.