Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 14

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

• 

  Review by Branson Reese

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

• 

  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 3

  A work almost too disquieting: Procedural pushed to obsession pushed to psychosis. Starts as a seeming vision of 90's Tokyo as a city of corpses and interrogation rooms, but even as it does work on sociological levels, (similar to Pulse, Kurosawa uses genre trappings to have us reflect on present spaces and objects) it's a film of the psyche first and foremost. I can't think of a movie that feels more scarring. Even reflections on voyeurism & cinema: by desiring to understand evil we risk getting to close to it, and if we get too close to evil we will become evil. Even as we travese physical spaces we enter psychological ones, like Mamiya's cell or the abandoned house. And when these spaces intercut, even a cup of water is terrifying.

• 

  Review by Hungkat ★★★★★ 9

  Kurosawa does for sweaters, cigarette lighters, water, papers, wind, people, room corners, and liminal spaces what Jaws did for the sea.

• 

  Review by kailey ★★★★★ 35

  choose the word or phrase that doesn't belong in the set

  1. do you remember?
  2. tell me about yourself
  3. i am empty and you are filled with rage
  4. human beings are essentially good

  1. waves
  2. fire
  3. air
  4. paper

  1. a blurred face
  2. blood dripping down a sink
  3. two men dueling in a room
  4. your sanity

  1. a happy marriage
  2. a fulfilling job
  3. a healthy outlook on life
  4. a job that asks you to stare straight in the face of evil and tells you that sometimes the cause is... nothing

  1. you know nothing
  2. you will never know
  3. the world is far vaster and more scary than…

• 

  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½ 14

  As I mentioned with Pulse, one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best traits as a filmmaker is that his presentation of material has a lack of an emphatic expression to it. The shibui nature of his filmic style, as Bordwell suggests, offers us all the narrative information in the frame necessary, but rarely highlights its relative importance. The rigorousness of this formula thus puts an indelible amount of faith in the spectator to become involved in the narrative, finding horror in commonplace frames that don't tell us to find horror.

  Cure's one mistake comes in its initial moments, a murder that happens indifferent to the frame involving a blunt object, ironically scored to kitschy music that feels like something out of the…

• 

  Review by Christina ★★★★½ 3

  venting to murder suspects about how much of a drag your sick wife is > therapy

• 

  Review by Adam Nayman ★★★★★ 10

  The killer in me is the killer in you

• 

  Review by YI JIAN ★★★★★ 11

  Cure is the manifestation of malaise, it's being in the same room with a serial killer, where each sound made is distinctly registered and every tiny action raises an alarm. Cure is pure evil, it makes us jump at the most insignificant details, the flick of a lighter, the tilt of a glass of water, motions of a mere plastic stirrer, the faint, omnipresent static noise, listen to it, that's our brain trying to shut everything out, a self-defense mechanism against the unknown. Cure is a peaceful death under calm, unwavering hands, violence stripped of impact, blood detached from reality, while the musicians forgot to do their job and the camera unflinchingly stared ahead -- but still -- the sight…

• 

  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

• 

  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 42

  MESMERISM AND THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE

  This one little stray title on a textbook lying discarded in Mamiya's room was what tied it all together for me. The Enlightenment was a 17th and 18th century philosophical movement that sought to understand the world through empiricism and rationality. Here, in 1997 when Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure was released, at the end of the 20th century, at the peak of the postmodern era, that search for truth and understanding is over. It has failed. This failure rests at the heart of the film, it is the socio-cultural anxiety that drives the engine of the narrative: the death of knowledge and meaning.

  It starts out so simple. "People like to think…

• 

  Review by Karsten ★★★★★ 1

  unfortunately…

  monkey mondays #42