Critics reviews

“Tokyo Sonata” is a masterpiece, one of the best contemporary family dramas of all time and a must-see of all fans of cinema

What's ingenious about this sense of horror is not the loss of control but its eerie return - Debussy's "Claire de Lune" has never sounded more ominously soothing.

There are no ghosts in the family drama Tokyo Sonata, no senseless violence... but the spare, emptied-out cityscapes and sterile interiors clearly belong to [Kurosawa]... [The director] presents a post-bubble Japan that’s exhausted and absurd, lifelessly going through the motions, and no longer recognizable to itself.

[Tokyo Sonata] begins as a well-behaved story and takes detours into the comic, the macabre and the sublime... All of the performances have perfect pitch; the young son engages us in the same way as the hero of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows."

“Tokyo Sonata” is bold, acutely observant and universal in its wide-ranging concerns and implications... So strong a director is Kurosawa that he not only can get away with piling on disasters but makes his picture all the more powerful as a result.

A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.

As it ticks through the familiar ills brought about by a country outsourcing and downsizing itself into crisis, “Tokyo Sonata” takes on increasingly uncanny and timely resonance for an American audience.

So much about the movie is laced with real wit and compassion.

[A] deft, bracingly unpredictable movie... [Tokyo Sonata] seems a little rough in places. Yet that stylistic gawkiness suits the story, a tale of unexpected developments and unforeseeable consequences. [This] is not Kiyoshi Kurosawa's most cataclysmic parable, but its depiction of Japan's middle class is among the director's most foreboding visions.

Kurosawa’s always been something of a trickster, and Tokyo Sonata tricks us in an occasionally edifying way: it makes us look so closely at recognizable people that they become unfamiliar, only to then remind us that they were not all that different from us in the first place.

“Tokyo Sonata” is such an impressive piece of filmmaking that it almost doesn’t matter when the film threatens to derail midway through its second hour. Tonally, the movie strikes an uncomfortable, constantly shifting balance between the deadpan and the earnest before taking a turn towards the nearly fantastic.

A visually lyrical, narratively Fassbinderesque examination of a Japanese nuclear family in meltdown... Kurosawa’s consummate tonal shifts allow the film to move fluidly from analytic realism to hallucinatory subjectivity and back again. Imagine a marriage between The Merchant of Four Seasons and In a Year of 13 Moons.