Collette's pitch-perfect performance and the stunning evocation of the forbidding and beautiful outback make this film unexpectedly rewarding.

| Sep 29, 2017

An underdeveloped film that requires all of [Collette's] ample skills merely to rise to the mediocre.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 20, 2004

Lots of pictures begin strongly only to lose their focus; this one gains momentum with every sequence -- ambivalent at first, we're firmly hooked by the final frame.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2004

Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2004

A raw emotional journey in which character is everything -- although the scenery is spectacular.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2004

It's powerful, but fatally contrived

| Jun 2, 2004

Tender, original and moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2004

Starts off promisingly. Eventually, though, it collapses into melodrama.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 23, 2004

Fails to engage us in the lives of its characters because it never really introduces them.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 9, 2004

Brooks's spare and reverberant film ... stands back from the actors and just lets them be with each other.

Full Review | Apr 2, 2004

A mediocre, self-consciously arty story.

Full Review | Apr 2, 2004

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 16, 2004

You know, I'm this close, but I can't recommend it.

Full Review | Feb 23, 2004

Flows too quickly past other points where the story needed to slow down to allow the import of what was being said to sink in.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Feb 6, 2004

Collette truly has a face the camera loves, and her expressiveness gives substance and symmetry to the uneven Japanese Story.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 5, 2004

Refreshingly simple and quiet.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 30, 2004

To mildly respect Japanese Story is easy. To enjoy it would require an act of will.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 30, 2004

This is that rare sort of film that is not about what happens, but about what happens then.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 30, 2004

A mawkish fusion of Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and the recent Lost in Translation, with cultural politics even more problematic than those Sofia Coppola danced about in her film.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 30, 2004

On one level -- an important one -- Brooks' picture, erotically charged and haunting, is about the way people connect, and change each other, profoundly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 29, 2004