Critics reviews

Following the rich and despairing pageantry of Ran, his epic reimagining of King Lear, Akira Kurosawa opted to turn inward, resulting in Dreams, an intimate anthology film that finds its raw source material in the director's own inner experience.

Watching it today, however, for all its purported serenity, the film's effect is deeply unnerving. Its prevailing mood feels more like one of helplessness—of humans at the mercy of a mercurial world and the consequences of their own carelessness. It is at once one of the calmest and one of the most terrifying works of Kurosawa's career.

Like the magic lantern that evokes childhood's fascination with moving images in the films of Ingmar Bergman, the whole of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams seems to take us back to the medium's infancy, to its primal pleasures and terrors. It is a film in which the shot, the sequence, and every element of cinematic storytelling feel newly invented.

In the uneven career of Akira Kurosawa, two limiting factors were sentimentality and preachiness, and both come to the fore in this 1990 collection of eight dreams, some of which are more like parables or fairy tales.

Depicting, rather indulgently, a number of dreams vaguely intended to reflect Kurosawa's life and abiding obsessions, this is - to be frank - regrettably embarrassing. Its eight episodes, moving from childhood through war to a terror of nuclear pollution, are wholly devoid of narrative drive.

The film follows four magical chapters with four rather overexplicit, talky ones. No matter. Dreams is at once buoyant and extraordinarily passionate: It has the feel of an urgent message to the living and the dead.