Reviews
Time Out
David Jenkins
“It’s an unhurried and precise film, but approach it on these terms and you’ll find a sensitive, profoundly perceptive and life-affirming study of what it means to develop a bond with someone else... Remarkable and devastating work.”
10/03/2011
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“Tran’s script is slow and faithful. Two suicides take place. The weather is grim in the sanatorium mountains. Yet the film’s lyricism is unshakeable, descending on the characters like the rain in those mountains, which spears down dark and windswept, resembling the surreal rain in a Rousseau jungle painting.”
09/03/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“This movie is gorgeously photographed by Ping Bin Lee, and has a plangent, keening orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood. It rewards attention with a very sensual experience, although there might be some who, understandably, find it indulgent.”
10/03/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“In fact, Norwegian Wood doesn't quite feel like a real Japanese film, more a French imagining of one. The world Tran creates is like a virtual Japan, inhabited by infuriatingly shy ghosts. And the film is something of a shy ghost too, politely declining to step out from behind the pale screen of its own sublime reserve. ”
13/03/2011
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The Observer
Philip French
“Norwegian Wood is a languorous, visually striking movie about love and loss, infused with the earnestness of young people struggling with powerful emotions and with evolving ideas about life, death, art, freedom and responsibility.”
13/03/2011
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The Sunday Times
Jonathan Dean
“This Haruki Murakami adaptation may be too long, but it is also, in its sunspots, beautifully serious, in the way losing one’s virginity is.”
13/03/2011
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The Times
Wendy Ide
“The problem is an overly reverent approach to the material. Murakami purists would probably disagree but there are rather a lot of dead scenes and superfluous characters that probably should have remained in the book rather than made the journey on to the screen... That said, the film is not without its plus points. It’s undoubtedly a thing of beauty. ”
11/03/2011
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Empire Magazine
Andrew Male
“Murakami's 'unadaptability' for the screen is self-evident to fans of his books, but this is a noble if bleak first stab.”
11/03/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
“Paris-based Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo, The Scent of Green Papaya) and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin focus on the story’s eroticism and the characters’ loneliness. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes a sympathetic score. Too often, though, the film comes across as a mere summary of Murakami’s book.”
10/03/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“The glacial pace, on the other hand, will put even sympathetic souls to the test.”
11/03/2011
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Total Film
Philip Kemp
“True, the film looks gorgeous, but that hardly makes up for the atmosphere of resigned glumness.”
02/03/2011
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