…rewards adventurous viewers with haunting, timeless ideas and luminous images…this absorbing folk-tale is rendered in a painterly manner by director Masaki Kobayashi and the overall effect is somehow soothing rather than disturbing...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2024

A film of methodical pacing, theatricality, and avant-garde flourishes, which work in harmony to acknowledge that something lies beyond any grounded understanding of reality.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 12, 2022

The stories themselves fall somewhere between classic fables and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And the feeling? There's nothing quite like it.

| Oct 25, 2021

Director Masaki Kobayashi effectively makes use of color, concentrating on whites, greys and beiges to impart his eerie atmosphere.

| Sep 20, 2021

An artistic triumph for the director Masaki Kobayashi, his cameramen and his art directors.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 20, 2021

Kwaidan moves slowly and deliberately and yet holds you so completely in its grip that you find your pulse racing madly in rhythm with the images that flood the screen.

| Sep 20, 2021

Kwaidan is not for everyone. It is for the lover of the offbeat and eerie. It is a film you will not soon forget.

| Sep 20, 2021

A trilogy of Poe-like horror stories, it is, at the same time, one of the eeriest and most beautiful films ever made.

| Sep 20, 2021

This awesome and enthralling Japanese [film] weaves a spell of enchantment with its weird stories, which unfold amidst settings of surrealistic splendor that have been photographed in the most breathtaking color since Gate of Hell.

| Sep 20, 2021

In the course of the film, Kobayashi treats us to an unrivaled visual experience.

| Sep 20, 2021

All three stories are weird and wonderful, and under Kobayashi's direction, the film casts its own exotic and highly colourful spell.

| Sep 20, 2021

Judged purely as an expensive mood piece, the film could be considered a great success. The best thing about Kwaidan is its otherworldly, haunted atmosphere.

| Sep 20, 2021

[Kwaidan] combines the fantastic color of Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits with Poe-like burstings of Gothic horror.

| Sep 20, 2021

There aren't likely to be many films this year as visually magnificent as Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan.

| Sep 20, 2021

It is more like a picture on a wall than something that should move on a screen. The director seems never to know when to have done with a scene and be on to another sequence.

| Sep 20, 2021

[Kwaidan is] filmed in exquisite color and told without any compromises to foreign tastes, which both guarantees the film's integrity and asks a lot of audiences.

| Sep 20, 2021

There's only one film (Losey's Accident) that I've enjoyed more this year.

| Sep 20, 2021

Kobayashi has a theatrical sense and a feeling for style that lend his work an almost choreographic quality, sustained by the uniform grace and physical eloquence of his players.

| Jun 23, 2020

shot mostly on sound stages in constructed sets with highly mannered backdrops, this is a film of a rare, hermetic beauty, full of ethereal images and errant ideas that will haunt the mind.

| Apr 27, 2020

The stories represent a wonderful clash of the old and new as the traditional fables meet the modern magic of cinema.

| Original Score: 4 | Apr 25, 2020