Fresh
There's greatness in the film's first hour.
Terrence Rafferty, New Yorker
Dreams
The past, present, and future. The thoughts and images of one man... for all men. One man's dreams... for every dreamer.
1990 · 1h 59m · PG
Drama, Fantasy
Directed by
Akira Kurosawa
,
Ishirō Honda
Overview
Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.
Director and cast
- Akira Kurosawa Director
- Ishirō Honda Director
- Akira Terao as I
- Mitsuko Baisho as Mother of 'I'
- Toshie Negishi as Mother carrying child
- Mieko Harada as The Snow Fairy
- Mitsunori Isaki as 'I' as a boy
- Toshihiko Nakano as 'I' as a young child
- Yoshitaka Zushi as Pvt. Noguchi
- Hisashi Igawa as Nuclear Plant Worker
- Chosuke Ikariya Cast
- Chishū Ryū Cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
67%
Tomatometer
Rotten
In the uneven career of Akira Kurosawa, two limiting factors were sentimentality and preachiness, and both come to the fore in this 1990 collection of eight dreams.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Rotten
Only during a final procession does the old Kurosawa magic get a brief look-in, but by then the hackneyed moralising and dramatic languor have ensured that, despite the well-meaning message, it's hard to care.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Fresh
It's something altogether new for Kurosawa, a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future. The magical and mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical.
Vincent Canby, New York Times
Fresh
Dreams will knock your eyes out without ignoring the mind and heart.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
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