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Critics Consensus: With its thought-provoking themes, rich atmosphere, and brilliant direction, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari is a towering classic of world cinema.
Critic Consensus: With its thought-provoking themes, rich atmosphere, and brilliant direction, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari is a towering classic of world cinema.
View All Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) News
All Critics (25) | Top Critics (7) | Fresh (25) | Rotten (0) | DVD (5)
With rare humanity, Mizoguchi reveals the toll these misadventures take on the souls of both men and their wives, many moments an uncanny synthesis of the realistic and the otherworldly.
Tale of two men in seething 16th-century Japan has a color and panorama which makes this absorbing film fare.
A marvelously wise and moving classic, but also one full of sights that might make you cry, like Genjuro, 'I never imagined such pleasures existed!'
A ravishingly composed, evocatively beautiful film.
One of the greatest of all films.
Kenji Mizoguchi, who directed, has a fantastic flexibility in using his actors and his camera, as witness his range in this film.
Part sensual ghost story and part cautionary tale about profiteering from war, Ugetsu is a stunning film.
It is maybe even the most important of all war movies, despite showing not more than a few minutes of anything we might properly consider to be "combat".
Rarely, however, has its visual beauty been equaled.
In exploring the transience of happiness and the injustice of patriarchal society, Mizoguchi makes lyrical use of gliding long takes that reinforce his material and mystical themes. It's a work of sheer genius.
Mizoguchi's graceful, meditative camera style lends quiet intensity to the drama.
One of the masterpieces of Japanese and world cinema.
Beautiful morality tale. When dreaming with a better life becomes greater, blinding us, foreshadowing everything we have, and this seemingly improved life gained reveals itself as a mirage, a pile of nothingness, that's the only time people feel the urge to get back home. There are men so poor that the only thing they have is money.
Super Reviewer
From the Criterion Collection, Spine No. 309. Hailed by critics as one of the greatest films ever made, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is an undisputed masterpiece of Japanese cinema. Set in the 16th Century, A family man farmer and craftsman Genjurô travels to Nagahama to sell his wares and makes a small fortune. His neighbor Tobei that is a fool man dreams on becoming a samurai, but he can not afford to buy the necessary outfit. So starts the story of 2 different men and the rise and fall. It takes a different person to watch and enjoy not only films from the Criterion Collection, but also it takes a little bit to watch and understand a fifties movie from Japan. But once you get into these movies your hooked. Please try one and enjoy. 4 1/2 stars.
i hadnt seen this film in a few years, and it was even better the second time. one of the best film presentations of what happens when a man puts ambition over the love and needs of his own family. mizoguchi is a master with the camera and the musical score heightened the ghost elements of the story perfectly. a phenomenal film.
Mizoguchi's masterful rendering of ambition and greed. I loved the supernatural elements of the story. Every bit as good as (if not better than) Sansho the Bailiff.
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