Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

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V H @RT45923986 12/28/2024 Drama, suspense, choreography and costume mesmerizing -such beauty in color, character, movement and emotion! Eight vignettes -dreams of Kurosawa’s. All quite different—childhood, guilt, death are but three. Be prepared for a long movie. My only negative is it tends to be somewhat lecturing…could the English translation be one reason?? Highly recommend. See more NICOLE W @NWOPW 11/22/2023 This movie had amazing visuals and riveting stories. The audience score is accurate, in that if one chooses to watch this movie, there is some self-selection, and one is more likely to rate it higher. And it delivers. See more Desmond B @RT31839822 05/14/2023 Dreams is a sumptuous, thoughtful, dramatic, film from which I found it hard to look away. Although it is one of Kurosawa's last films, it shows him at the height of his power and creativity, and offers a glimpse into his mind, just as he glimpses the mind of van Gogh. My review is at https://thecannibalguy.com/2023/05/14/dreams-1990/ See more william d @acsdoug 10/11/2022 There are some very beautiful images here. However, just like dreams in real life, the stories are haphazard, uninteresting to the outside observer, and ultimately inconsequential. See more Michael M @RT35696549 09/07/2021 While not Kurosawa's best work and certainly not his most accessible, this anthology is nothing if not interesting. Each vignette has a distinctive and often gorgeous aesthetic, and while the writing is uneven (the final story, "Village of the Water Mills", feels like a polemic for luddism), the film captures the hallucinatory quality of half-remembered dreams extremely effectively. The cameo by Martin Scorsese in what I consider to be the film's best segment ("Crows") also made the film worth watching - seeing a collaboration between the two directors, even this minor, is something of a dream come true. See more 06/03/2021 We all remember fairy tales—short stories of heroism and wicked foes, where the honorable ones triumph over tragedy. Then it's happily ever after, right? "Once upon a time" translates to "once I had a dream" in Akira Kurosawa's personal film Dreams (1990). Kurosawa created his own collection of eight phantasmagoric fables filled with cultural references to Japanese folklore and his life. But, like Grimms' Fairy Tales, each dream is a tall tale with a dark twist: be prepared to sleep with your eyes wide open. When the first dream begins, you realize something isn't right. A sunny day suddenly turns into a downpour in the forest by a little boy's house, but the sun doesn't stop shining. He stares at the light quivering over the trees while his mother explains that it's dangerous to go out because the foxes like to hold their wedding processions in this odd weather. He absolutely must not see them, or else. She promptly heads inside. Of course, the boy is curious (and so are we). Cue some fog machines and eerie painted faces, and you'll start to feel a little anxious for the kid. In another dream, an art student studies the most famous pieces by Vincent Van Gogh in a gallery. A painting suddenly becomes another version of reality that's half tangible and half post-impressionist linework, so he takes a walk through the bright countryside within to search for the influential artist himself. Surprisingly (if you skipped past the opening credits), acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese plays the eccentric Van Gogh. It's oddly entertaining, and I won't spoil the rest. "The Tunnel" is an absolute masterpiece. Compared to all the other dreams, it's truly something else. Suspenseful, chilling, and beautiful. You wouldn't want to have dreamt it yourself because it's so bitterly sad. Thankfully, "Village of the Watermills" puts us at ease at the end of the dream sequence. If you watch the whole film, you'll get to experience four more. The content varies widely amongst the dreams, but they are generally connected through themes of wonder, horror, spirituality, nature, moralism—and also the fact that Kurosawa appears in every single one at some stage of his life. You can play several rounds of a game guessing how old he'll be in the next one. The darkest parts touch on suicide, cannibalism, demons, and nuclear death, which are mixed with elements of childhood, remorse, and peace in natural harmony. So he isn't all doom and gloom, and Dreams isn't a horror film. Kurosawa particularly focuses on mistakes made by humans against nature. He poetically reminds us to be grateful for what we have, preserve the environment, and practice humility. These messages may come off as didactic or cliché to a more skeptical viewer, but considering how reflective the film is of Kurosawa's own psyche and subconscious imagination, perhaps the lessons aren't for us at all. The dreams are inherently personal, and they live inside him. But I'll let you figure out whatever that means; everyone's a dream interpreter in their own right. Maybe Kurosawa pities the human race, and "dreaming" is the most subtle way to show it (just kidding). The film loses one star for a couple reasons. Some of the scenes are long, or at least longer than they need to be when establishing the mood and getting the point across. He'll put you in a trance, which is a waste when the spell wears off on a drawn-out sequence. The demons are grotesque, and the foxes uncanny, but the camera didn't have to wait on shot after shot of the same thing at mostly similar angles. The film would have been just as compelling and mystical had he shaved a minute off here and there, where it was primarily for prolonging the spectacle and didn't actually affect the dreams' rhythm. Luckily the slow pacing doesn't detract from the most intense and memorable moments. The overall experience would just really benefit from the cuts. On the other hand, the dreamscapes are beautifully crafted with an eye for cinematic minimalism. Both the colors and textures are rich. The lighting is carefully executed with intention, and the soundtrack will raise the hairs on your neck. The special effects don't look hackneyed or too obvious considering the decade Dreams was released, with the one exception being the explosions of "Mount Fuji in Red," which felt culturally meaningful but sort of ridiculous visually. The film's only other major weakness is that not every single dream is objectively worth remembering. Some dreams are just much more compelling than others, and that applies to real life too. You might enjoy all of them regardless, but you'll probably be tempted to skip at least one. Either way, the film is guaranteed to make you feel something. Because the best moments truly humanize us, I wanted to cry more than I wanted to laugh, which is equally good and sad. Akira Kurosawa's dreams are not for the faint of heart. Dreams is a dark fantasy where the sun shines in front of a veil that separates the supernatural from the living. He takes magical realism to new realms, inspiring the audience to contemplate and wonder. There's something to be gleaned from each story, like the lessons we take from fairy tales and nursery rhymes as children. And despite their moralistic notes embedded in uncanny twists, we never forget them. See more Read all reviews

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

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