A brilliant film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 24, 2020

An astounding work of intimate detail that should not be missed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 16, 2019

With its slow pace, weird stabs at slapstick, and odd stilted performances, The Sun may not be for everyone -- but in its very perverseness, it has to to be noted that this is a unique, mesmerizing, mad and brilliantly intuitive study.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 27, 2019

Lauding the work of Russia's finest living director is getting repetitive, but Sokurov goes from strength to strength.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 26, 2019

Hirohito's interest in marine biology provides Sokurov with a fruitful thematic and visual leitmotif: images of fish glide through the film, marking its most emotionally and politically significant moments.

| Aug 29, 2018

Sokurov, who also acted as director of photography, films the character and his surroundings with the eye of a newly arrived visitor to another world.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

... not a conventional biographical portrait by any definition, but rather a reflection in the inner life of the Emperor, a man who was considered a god by his people and treated as such.

| Jun 10, 2010

Alexander Sokurov's "The Sun," arriving in the U.S. five years after its release in Europe, is a stunning film, fascinating to some, probably sleep-inducing to others.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 25, 2010

Those with the patience to stick with Sokurov's stately pacing will find an engrossing character study in "The Sun," that of a very odd, polite man who also happened to lead a nation at war during World War II.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 30, 2010

It's been called maddeningly meditative and a vision of life shrouded in dust and cobwebs

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 13, 2010

Sokurov takes a few steps back and observes Hirohito and MacArthur with something like amused equanimity.

| Apr 6, 2010

Working from Yuri Arabov and Jeremy Noble's script, Sokurov has a wonderful time not simply with Hirohito and history, but with his filmmaking, which can be oblique to the point of being stultifying. Here he plays with scale.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2010

Alexander Sokurov's The Sun demands and rewards patience.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2010

Sokurov doesn't answer MacArthur's disingenuous question, but ... he suggests why no one else can either.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2010

...a fine historical biography of man, little known to most of the world, but one who held the Pacific Rim and China in his hands (and almost won it) nearly 70 years ago.

| Original Score: A | Mar 17, 2010

...Aleksandr Sokurov films the first half of his movie as if underwater, a sinking ship as it were, with slightly tilted angles, the sound of groaning metal, and staircases spiraling down to an underground bunker.

| Original Score: A | Mar 7, 2010

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 25, 2009

Finds beauty, madness and outright bizarreness in the sight of a lost, slightly freakish man attempting to understand his altering reality.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 7, 2009

The early portions of The Sun are almost nightmarish in their cold shots of Hirohito trudging slowly through bleak hallways, coiffed to a sterile perfection.

| Original Score: 83/100 | Dec 3, 2009