Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Reviews

A lyrical, slow-moving documentary on Japan's abiding fascination with insects.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

[A] surprisingly delightful little film...

Full Review

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is a bizarre, fascinating and frequently beautiful documentary but it's also let down by a frustrating lack of structure.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

What an original and distinctive film this is.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

No, not a Toho creature feature, but a diverting, slightly meandering, mini- DV-shot documentary on the Japanese love for insects.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

There's a hypnotic quality to its flow of images, allowing the viewer to see the insect world anew.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

An oddball documentary that strives to capture the essence of an entire culture through one preoccupation: insects.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

Creepy, crawly and profound, this thought-provoking eco-doc wows with breathtaking imagery.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

Beetle Queen does a wonderful job of showing the connection between things like Zen gardens, bonsai trees and the love of watching insects move in a small habitat.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

A parade of loosely, lyrically related scenes and images imbues the film with a wonder worthy of its subjects.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

This lyrical, meditative effort about the Japanese obsession for bugs of all kinds examines the subject from a deeply philosophical, historical and sociological perspective.

Quietly spellbinding.

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A gentle docu-tribute to Japan's age-old connection to the insect world, a meditative piece that is by turns hypnotically beautiful and painfully slow.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Oreck gives us some marvelous close-ups of scampering beetles and butterflies emerging from their pupae, but the focus here is primarily on people.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

An entomologist's delight, Jessica Oreck's movie about Japan's insect mania is worth watching even if you're repulsed by creepy-crawlers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Sean Price Williams' videography is so lovely -- and the film so meditatively paced -- that even the questionable becomes seductive.

Full Review | Original Score: B

Technically ambitious, Beetle Queen succeeds where a recent armada of embarrassingly sentimental, hugely liberal eco-docs have failed

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Beautifully filmed, seductively narrated...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

A scientist looking for a combination of childlike innocence and minimalist sophistication might not see it in Hello Kitty but can recognize it in a horned beetle.

| Original Score: 3/5