This may lack the understated pathos of Ozu's somber masterpiece, but it's still a moving meditation on aging and loss, and Wepper and Elsner are unforgettable.

| Jul 30, 2015

The example set by Ozu's best works goes unheeded as the film becomes too cutesy and forced to be moving.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 9, 2009

Ozu's handling of the frosty schism between awkward parents and their ghastly offspring resulted in a heartbreaking piece of cinema. This lovely update is not quite in the same tragi-comic league, but it's authentic enough to prick tears.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2009

This is a sweet-natured piece, and though the final section in Tokyo itself is sentimental and over-extended, there are poignant, mordant insights.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2009

Unpredictable and compelling, this draws parallels between Japanese and German cultures in interesting and moving ways.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2009

If she doesn't quite go the distance - resonance needs richer characterisation, origami finer scissors - Cherry Blossoms is still a touching, tangibly personal chamber movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2009

A uniquely poignant meditation on mortality.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 2, 2009

The movie is an ideal blend of character study, deceptively simple plot twists, inspired acting, and travelogue.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 20, 2009

A quiet, moving tale of love and loss.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

If you have ever seen Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story -- one of the greatest films ever made -- you may respond to Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms, which is a kind of homage.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 2, 2009

A most beautiful film.

| Feb 27, 2009

Cherry Blossoms is both austere and garish, simultaneously dry and sentimental, tightly repressed and extravagantly expressive, bourgeois and bohemian. It's a seesaw, but [director] Dorrie finds the balance.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 26, 2009

Yearning for Ozu, Dörrie stops off at cute, and parks.

| Feb 26, 2009

There's meat and sustenance there, but Cherry Blossoms too often traffics in shopworn Western notions of Japanese culture; it's a pilgrim's-eye-view of Zen.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2009

There's a grace to it all, and moments of oddball poetry will reward patient viewers.

| Original Score: B | Jan 22, 2009

It is a seldom-told story in an essentially youth-oriented, escapist movie industry, but when it is told sublimely well, as it is by Ms. Dörrie now, and by McCarey in 1937, and by Ozu in 1953, it becomes a film for the ages.

Full Review | Jan 21, 2009

The movie's conceits are just barely endurable, but the sharpness of Dörrie's eye -- for Tokyo's electric night, for Fuji's iconographic landscapes, for cherry blossoms -- sustains emotion even when story logic fails.

| Jan 20, 2009

Refusing to be rushed, Doris Dorrie blends individual experiences with universal emotions to create a quietly moving study of self-discovery.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2009

At more than two hours, Cherry Blossoms could do with some pruning.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 16, 2009

Doris Dorrie's Cherry Blossoms is both a tender tale of cultural crossings and a double portrait of grief.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 16, 2009