| Brandon Films | Release Date: January 1, 1955 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
17
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
|
Critic Reviews
Jan 11, 2022
The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]
Jan 11, 2022
I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.
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TV Guide MagazineJan 11, 2022
Jan 11, 2022
A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.
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Jan 11, 2022
A harrowing yet sublime work that has to do with the exceptionally cruel fate of an 11th-Century noblewoman, played by the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka. [12 Aug 1985, p.2]
Jan 11, 2022
There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.
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The Observer (UK)Jan 11, 2022
It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]
The TelegraphJan 11, 2022
The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]
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