Popular reviews

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  Review by Gondo ★★★★½

  By reshuffling our spatial orientation through careful staging techniques, Oguri is able to expand the scope of this very human sadness with almost every cut. The first scene is exemplary for that. She looks away out of disgust, he looks at her because he cares but than the camera gives us an overview and both of them actually just stare at the wall in front of them, disconnected from each other. A literal nightmare.

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  Review by willy vvvv

  a sad comedy about how we all turn to kids again when things don't go our way.

  though idk wheter it was actually supposed to be funny or if it's just me as outsider perceiving this particular manifestation of the signature japanese inability to express emotions and the absurd situations it leads to as funny. 

  then again older films from anywhere always got the amped theatrics. (edit - i thought this was a 60s film.. nvm that) that mixed with the former, idk, i guess it's just me.

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  Review by cineronin ★★★★

  A heavy , tumultuous experience, The Sting of Death may not be a fun watch, but the films craft is very impressive, a film that is subtle in its style, atmosphere, and surrealism, blending the intricate compositions of Ozu with the moody atmosphere. Kôhei Oguri's The Sting of Death captures how lack of trust and insecurity often create emotional trauma.

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  Review by Varghese ★★★★

  Since time immemorial the decline of marriage in cinema has always followed a standard rule..Here it goes from melodrama to quirky comedy to apathy. This winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival is strictly for those who adore Japanese cinema just like me. Worth a few more viewings. Plus some stunning sequences of the sky and landscape.

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  Review by David Auerbach

  A friend and I saw Sting of Death recently and were bewildered by it. An ex-soldier in 1955 or so confesses his infidelity to his wife. For two hours, they alternate between robotic interactions drained of inflection (Bresson on Haldol) and histrionic fits of attempted suicide, murder, etc. There is little of psychological depth actually said, and little plot. I did not enjoy the movie and I think the film unsuccessful and unnecessarily opaque. Normally this means I wouldn’t write about it, but since (a) there is almost no English reference to this movie on the web, and (b) I have already written a letter to my friend describing my eventual interpretation of the movie in response to his, I…

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  Review by jrhovind ★★★

  One couple’s marital malaise oneirically rendered as having the same tortured conversation in some sort of purgatorial loop, their simmering resentments and buried traumas and mutual animosity emerging as so many bits of wreckage from the largely decontextualized maelstrom. A bruised, broken roundelay of role-playing and recriminations and humiliations; it’s unnervingly effective, even if it ultimately gets crushed by the exhausting homogeneity of its own design. Marriage as a prison built for – and by – two, its prisoners each unwilling to shatter any of the walls whose movability they’ve long ceased to recognize; a private little world built only of its own bitterly lost illusions, one from which there’s ultimately only escape. “Will I get better?” “If you sleep well.”

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  Review by bichogrilo ★★★½

  Na sessão algumas pessoas riram em determinadas cenas, mas garanto que todo mundo entendeu, portanto, era riso de dor e desconforto.

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  Review by Eric Eidelstein ★★★

  A relentless glance at a relationship in an unfixable state of paralysis and paranoia. Each and every fight you have in a relationship is essentially the same fight, and that is never clearer when there's infidelity involved. Here, a pained wife is driven insane because she feels like she can no longer trust her unfaithful husband. And the husband, eager to repair the marriage, feels stifled and is driven mad by his wife's obsessive mistrust. They can't do anything but fight for control. An unpleasant watch.

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  Review by 水原吸管 ★★★★

  松坂慶子的瘋魔演出，優秀的構圖可以說是教科書了，其中她與岸部一德談判時，岸部一德時而被門遮住，岸部一德帶給我既渙散又模糊的狀態，亦捉摸不了美穂的精神狀態，兩小時的電影體感像電影中的這對貌合神離的夫妻十年般漫長。

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  Review by LaternaMagica ★★★★★

  How to achieve perfection in a complex film

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  Review by ricardo ★★★★½

  a great example of oguri’s creeping filmic fantasies that would fully take over on his next movie, where he nearly completely trades narrative for anxiety ridden flashes…he’s still interested in the former here, but uses it as a base to deconstruct an abusive domestic household…highlighting the absurdities to an almost comic level at points. i started out not really buying a lot of this movie but as it trudged a long found myself more and more in awe of what oguri accomplished here.
  we won’t grow old together

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  Review by venee ★★★

  How tragic it is to not get what you want