You’ll love the aliens—even root real hard for them—more than you will the humans (predictably, but also, “welcome to urf”), and that’s more than anybody can say for a whole bunch of humans-are-worse-than-aliens narratives we’ve seen before.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 9, 2024

Kurosawa’s film manages to hold interest throughout and, after some wild scenes of confusing character motivation in the third act, reaches a moment of real poignancy in its final scene.

| Dec 5, 2023

It wants nothing less in the end than to rend our souls - it just takes a circuitous route to get there

| Jul 2, 2021

Before We Vanish doesn't take a pro-alien or human stance (both sides deserve to lose at any point in time), but stands by karma as the ultimate universal law.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 10, 2020

While the plot used here is as cringe-worthingly cheesy as most alien invasions tend to be, many viewers will find plenty of worth in the emotions on display. As the aliens keep saying in the film: "This is interesting. I'll take it!"

| Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 23, 2019

Genre has always been his strong suit and Before We Vanish is entertaining and accomplished enough to show why Kurosawa remains one of Japan's foremost auteurs working today.

| Jun 5, 2019

A lively and unnerving but silly cerebral sci-fi alien invasion film to ponder in its strangeness.

| Original Score: B | Feb 15, 2019

The characters are flawed, thorny and affable, while sun-kissed settings and a John Williams-style score, by Yusuke Hayashi, alleviate the gloomy mood and doomsday notions.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 11, 2019

By the time the credits rolled, I felt that I'd seen something I wouldn't soon forget.

| Feb 9, 2019

Before We Vanish delights as much as it confuses - and, considering its slower pace and two-plus hour running time - occasionally bores.

| Oct 26, 2018

The plot takes some unexplained - or inexplicable - twists.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2018

Insanely fun and ambitious, but also quite melancholic.

| Aug 20, 2018

Kurosawa tackles some pretty big ideas about the human condition, again in his signature style of deliberate, understated precision.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 12, 2018

Before We Vanish is very funny, very bloody, and doesn't have a happy ending.

| Mar 13, 2018

In some ways, a distant and much less portentous cousin to 2016's Arrival.

| Mar 8, 2018

Based on a play by Tomohiro Maekawa, Before We Vanish-its Japanese title means "Strolling Invaders"-may not be prime Kurosawa, and it's oddly uneven in tone, but it has an ease about it that's intensely engaging.

| Mar 2, 2018

... one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 16, 2018

As an experiment in blending the minute character observations of Kurosawa's dramas into a pure genre plot, Before We Vanish does succeed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 16, 2018

Opening with moments of shocking violence but quickly sliding into absurdist whimsy, this is a weird one even for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. But it has its moments.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2018

Kurosawa's parable about the prisons we carry about with us is thought-provoking and occasionally witty, but not concise. The Japanese title literally means "Strolling Aliens", a clue to how much the movie meanders.

| Feb 15, 2018