Perhaps the best advice is, stop worrying about meaning. Sit back, enjoy its rich design, costumes, landscape and colours.

| Dec 14, 2017

Kitano's sensibilities as a blackly-comic director serve the film well

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2017

| Original Score: C | Sep 23, 2011

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2007

The stories have a fateful, lonely feel, like one of Wong Kar-wai's missed connections. Yet their tragic timelessness, and the lovely, aching pace at which they are told, bring them to a level of extraordinary beauty.

| Nov 8, 2007

| Original Score: C- | Nov 8, 2007

A tripy, fascinating film mixing puppeteering with live action.

| Original Score: A | Jun 21, 2007

...this anthology of tragic tales is never dull and always a feast for the eyes.

Full Review | May 28, 2005

Kitsch art.

| Original Score: B- | May 23, 2005

pretentious and as hollow as the puppets

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Mar 19, 2005

The cinematography is colorful and sweeping, the editing and storytelling simple and pure.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 11, 2005

There aren't many movies more visually beautiful than Takeshi Kitano's odd but moving "Dolls."

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2005

It's all as passionate, refined, and insistently sad as Bunraku puppetry itself.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 11, 2005

Dolls isn't a film for everybody, especially the impatient, but Kitano does succeed, I think, in drawing us into his tempo and his world, and slowing us down into the sadness of his characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 4, 2005

A work both rigorously stylized and deeply personal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 3, 2005

Devoted fans of Kitano will want to see Dolls. Others may be put off by the dirgelike pace (Kitano takes full credit for the editing) and a ghastly, mood-destroying pop-music number performed by Fukada.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Fascinating bits of behavior are scattered throughout these stories, but it cannot be said that the characters are fleshed out beyond their sentimental symbolism.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2005

The movie's pace is appropriate to its mood, which is crisp, melancholy and gently cruel.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 20, 2005

Though Kitano has called Dolls 'a puppet show with human characters,' there's nothing stiff or unreal about its intensity of feeling.

| Jan 20, 2005

If occasional pretentious doodling like this is what it takes to keep Kitano's copious creative juices flowing, so be it. The Great Ones are allowed the occasional snoozer.

| Jan 20, 2005