Cloud
Janus Films | Release Date: July 18, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews
Positive:
22
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Washington PostJen YamatoAug 8, 2025
A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” is as bleak a warning as you’ll find in theaters this year, cautioning against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJul 31, 2025
While Pulse was a warning, Cloud seems more like a funeral bell, a despairing look at life on the online economic periphery. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleJul 25, 2025
The journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriJul 18, 2025
Kurosawa films psychological torment with real gravity, and he films physical cruelty with humorous detachment. The absurdity of his vision matches our topsy-turvy reality. Read full review
63
Paste MagazineJarrod JonesJul 18, 2025
As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoJul 18, 2025
This is more “Reservoir Dogs” than “Ringu.” But whatever box one wants to place it in, it’s a reminder of Kurosawa’s remarkable skill with pacing and plotting, delivering a brisk film that leaves one pondering its themes, especially what it means to live in an era when nothing is real. Read full review
80
ColliderJeff EwingJul 18, 2025
It's an excellent, if imperfect, crime thriller, capably indicting our era with the same insight that Kurosawa brought to the internet's potential to isolate in Pulse. Read full review
75
Original-CinLiam LaceyJul 17, 2025
There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesJul 17, 2025
The final act of the film turns into an extended shootout, made gripping through Mr. Kurosawa’s expert construction of the scene, which is methodically paced and adept at keeping us oriented within the labyrinthine warehouse in which it unfolds. But beneath the action-movie surface lies a more despairing subject. Read full review
90
The New YorkerJustin ChangJul 17, 2025
Even amid the loud, incessant pop of gunfire, Kurosawa avoids monotony; he has a knack for embedding ideas within action, and for developing action in ways that trigger yet more ideas. Read full review
70
The New York TimesBrandon YuJul 17, 2025
For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us. Read full review
91
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJul 16, 2025
By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats. Read full review
80
IGNToussaint EganJul 16, 2025
Cloud is a masterful, paranoia-inducing action-thriller with a horror maestro’s touch, filled with great performances, terrifying scares, and a finale that will linger in your mind long after it’s over. Read full review
85
The Daily BeastNick SchagerJul 15, 2025
Cloud is a portrait of merciless 21st-century commerce and social cruelty that’s filtered through various genre lenses. Read full review
80
EmpireKambole CampbellApr 29, 2025
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film is a chilly and mystifying expression of a modern malevolence which hangs over our lives — like a cloud, if you will — worsened by constant digital connection. Read full review
80
Little White LiesJosh Slater-WilliamsApr 23, 2025
If you’ve ever wished ill towards a scalper, Kurosawa has the film for you. But this darkly comic thriller also skewers those who flirt with fantasies of vengeance from behind supposed anonymity. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawApr 23, 2025
The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding. Read full review
80
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannSep 9, 2024
The action isn't elegant. It's erratic and loud and ugly. . . it's a symphony of chaos. It's also a damn good time, even if Kurosawa leaves us with the haunting notion that we're all too connected, just one click away from finding opportunity or something much more dangerous. Read full review
83
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 1, 2024
A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest. Read full review
70
VarietyJessica KiangAug 31, 2024
An offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels. Read full review
60
Screen DailyWendy IdeAug 31, 2024
A film of two halves, Cloud’s excessive, bullet-strafed second section is more effective than the restrained and sluggish first part. The themes it explores are uncomfortably of the moment. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 31, 2024
This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerAug 31, 2024
Is any of this believable? Not really. Is some of it plain silly? Definitely. But it’s mostly enjoyable to watch, even if the film flies so far off the rails that there’s less suspense here than in the director’s stronger works. Read full review
50
The Daily BeastBarry LevittAug 31, 2024
Kurosawa creates such an eerie atmosphere in the first hour of Cloud that watching it crumble into more generic action territory is challenging, and feels like a miscalculation. It doesn’t help that much of the action in the second half isn’t particularly interesting. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChuck BowenAug 31, 2024
Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void. Read full review
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