Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring Reviews
Top Critic
The impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.
This is as close to a Zen experience as the movies offer.
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| Original Score: 5/5
A balm for the soul and a reminder that even in the frenetic city, the cosmos has its own steady pendulum.
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| Original Score: 4/5
As with most collections of short stories, some are more interesting than others. And the pacing is extremely slow -- almost meditative.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
With its heart-stopping setting, gorgeous images and a lovely little story, it's as fresh as woodland dew.
The floating monastery strikes one, at first, as far too empty a stage for a movie of any length, but it becomes, in the end, a meditation on walls, rules and memory, on the keeping out and the keeping in of life.
By turns humorous and tragic, Kim's film folds Buddhist belief into scenarios that capture the eye while they provoke the mind.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Beautifully composed as the film is, it borders on preciousness.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A little gem, it keeps its conflicting or varying themes of tranquility and violence, sacred and profane love, recklessness and wisdom, in almost perfect balance.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The lessons offered by Spring, Summer are as old as time. And for those who choose to worship at the altar of cinema, the images are unforgettable.
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| Original Score: A-
A sublime, witty, gritty and transcendental movie reflecting one man's life journey.
Beautiful and absorbing.
| Original Score: A-
Using perfectly composed shots to amplify an emotionally resonant story, the film successfully argues that 'artistic' films do not have to be boring.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
[Spring] probably represents the purest and most transcendent distillation of the Buddhist faith ever rendered on the screen.
Unlike many movies, this one feels completely organic, as if there's no other way it could play out but this.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
If Tarantino's film is built to thrill, Spring, Summer is made to last.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
In some ways, this is less a movie than a meditation. But that doesn't mean, like any meditation, it doesn't offer its own rewards.
In the end, inner peace is found by all -- on screen and in the audience.
| Original Score: 3/4
Where Kim's best-known movie, The Isle, was a stomach-churner, this beautifully composed canvas is the sort of film one falls into, resurfacing at the end with great reluctance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
As meditative and beautiful as its title would indicate.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The triumph of Spring, Summer is that even those of us who don't happen to be Buddhists can catch a glimpse of ourselves in the spinning wheel of hope, destruction, suffering, and bliss.
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| Original Score: A-
Kim Ki Duk, in this exquisitely simple movie, manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time to comprehend the scope of human experience.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Far from a maxim-expounding sermon, the film is a fresh spring of irrational visual pleasure.
A triumph of sheer cinematic craft that mirrors its characters' contemplative natures while extolling the virtues of lives simply led.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Backed by a terrific South Korean/German production crew, Kim Ki-duk is in total control of his material, its rhythms and its tone.
