It was here that Kurosawa Kiyoshi's distinctive approach to genre film fully bloomed, an oblique form of horror that unsettles precisely for how much exists outside the frame as much as what lies within it.

| Oct 18, 2022

an increasingly hallucinatory piece where murderousness is a disease spreading rapidly through the susceptible Japanese psyche.

| Apr 23, 2018

It's unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them.

| Oct 17, 2011

Tone and atmosphere mirror subject to perfection in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's hypnotic trip into the lower depths of the human mind.

| Mar 26, 2009

It's well enough acted and directed to advance Kurosawa's claim to be taken as an important new voice in Japanese cinema.

| Jun 24, 2006

The single best horror film I've seen this century.

| Original Score: A- | May 3, 2005

Tough to shake even when it feels more like an exercise than a movie.

| Original Score: B | Jun 6, 2002

Cure has a cumulative power of horror which even seasoned filmgoers will not be able to resist.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 8, 2001

It's more psychological than a genre movie, and that is the source of both its greatest interest and its biggest problem.

| Sep 21, 2001

A grave, magnificently creepy thriller.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2001

Once again [Kurosawa] takes on a familiar genre, the murder mystery, but he imbues it with so much angst and psychological juice that it takes on a life of its own.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2001

With its gift for infusing uneasiness into every frame, Kurosawa's moody, unnerving film continues to spook us even after the lights have gone on.

| Aug 15, 2001

Rather than resort to clever plot twists and reversals, Kurosawa constructs an elaborate psychological maze and then strands us in the middle of it.

Full Review | Aug 15, 2001

Cool and caustic.

| Aug 3, 2001

Kurosawa takes a reasonably engaging thriller plot and turns it into a mesmerizing masterwork.

| Aug 1, 2001

Cure sticks with you -- it's a movie about the power of suggestion that casts a troubling spell on the viewer as well.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2001