Recencies van critici

Despite or perhaps because of its lightly sketched premise, “To the Ends of the Earth” emerges as the director’s most gracefully assured work in a while, though his natural gift for building tension is still made subtly manifest.

Rather than a portrait of healthy cultural exchange, To the Ends of the Earth is a film that stirringly conjures longing for that connection in its absence... If [its] conclusion sounds like a self-actualization abroad cliché... it also adds an alternate ending to Kurosawa’s career-long narrative of contemporary estrangement.

“To the Ends of the Earth” isn’t about anything less than its heroine’s uncertain relationship with her foreign environment, and what she chooses to communicate simply by being seen and heard. Which is often thrilling to behold, but not so much to explain.

[This] is a film that blends fantasy and musical elements into the mix with such grace that one barely notices the transition. It's a film that takes its time but finds a natural rhythm, fluid and organic, drawing in the viewer as Yoko gradually forms a real connection with the world.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s contemplative and critical melodrama is a travelogue about a travelogue, a tale of the fabrications of reality TV and their effect on the fabricators.

[A] relatively quiet, sensitive portrayal of cross-cultural exchange and confusion, and a woman looking for herself in a place that’s strange to her. Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.

The film’s narrative is simultaneously plotless and intricately laid out, all leading inevitably to that indescribably exquisite moment on a mountain top, which ends the film.

What's truly spellbinding about "To the Ends of the Earth" is that Kurosawa doesn't seem to be doing too much pushing of his own. Instead, he gently nudges his heroine onwards into uncharted terrain, and in so doing carries the viewer's gaze into strange sidestreets and backalleys... Resistant to easy summary, "Ends" emerges as closer to a riddle, a deceptively simple recounting of lived and recalled experience.

Kurosawa comes up with nothing better than sentimental nonsense about a naïve young presenter who dreams of becoming a singer and finds her inner Julie Andrews atop an Uzbek mountain... Child-woman fantasies aside, Kurosawa does get some mileage out of Uzbek ‘primitivism’, [though] his satire is mostly toothless.

[A] sweet, sad, mysterious film in a vein of docu-realism, [which] really grew on me largely due to the transparently emotional and sensitive performance of its young lead, Atsuko Maeda, who plays Yoko, a young TV reporter filming what appears to be a light travel programme in Uzbekistan.

Beginning as an offbeat, fish-out-of-water travelogue, "To The Ends Of The Earth" gradually incorporates elements of an adventure movie, self-reflexive film shoot, and even musical melodrama. By the end, it’s no less than one of the most moving films Kurosawa has ever made.

"To the Ends of the Earth" is not a great film by any means. But it’s commendably efficacious and skilled in how it serves multiple purposes without seeming forced in any department. And the way it comes full circle at the end around Yoko’s emotional distress is especially quaint.