Labyrinth of Cinema still serves as a justified sendoff for legendary director Nobuhiko Obayashi, even if it wont go down as his magnum opus.

| Feb 12, 2022

Ôbayashi’s swan song proves that his passion, loopy sense of humor, and visual ingenuity remained fully intact until the end.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 8, 2022

"Labyrinth of Cinema" is good film for us movie buffs out there but it may be too long a slog for the average movie lover, especially because the octogenarian spends the last hour preaching his philosophy and political stance.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 7, 2022

Labyrinth of Cinema's breathtaking journey through time is a stunning endeavor, as timeless as they come, like much of the master's work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 31, 2021

...in his final film writer/director Nobuhiko Obayashi ("Hausu") once again makes his strong anti-war sentiments very clear while being riotously entertaining - if you can keep up with it...a worthy capper to the career of a true cinematic maverick.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 30, 2021

. . . (a) remarkable three-hour combination of saluting movies AND indicting war.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 11, 2021

A manic three-hour mashup of green screen FX and every other trick in the book, it manages to be a history of the world, of Japan, and of cinema itself, an entity both playful and exhausting.

| Nov 8, 2021

Frantic and occasionally messy as it is in adding up his country's often shameful past, the director's pacifist intent shines out brightly.

| Nov 5, 2021

Labyrinth of Cinema is a stunning film that pays homage to nearly every era of cinema to precede it while creating an entirely new type of cinema itself.

| Nov 4, 2021

Emerges as a touching plea for peace and an exuberant celebration of the artifice and transformative power of cinema.

| Oct 29, 2021

Over-the-top, zany and refreshingly unconventional, but it's too exhausting and overstays its welcome.

| Original Score: 4.873326/10 | Oct 25, 2021

Labyrinth of Cinema is tremendously affecting, frequently beguiling, usually exhausting, and on, and on, and on.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 20, 2021

If this sounds like too much for one filmmaker to tackle tonally - as "Duck Amuck" meets the most horrifying of historical tragedies - it would be for almost anyone who wasn't Obayashi.

| Oct 20, 2021

This mammoth final effort by Ôbayashi, an artist who so often destroyed the conventional boundaries of cinematic space in works like 1977's Hausu, is a completely humbling viewing experience.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 20, 2021

There's an experimental vein here that is more than welcome, but it's not by chance that the word labyrinth is in the title.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 19, 2021

Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 19, 2021

Obayashi Nobuhiko's three-hour swansong is a pop-art paean to pacifism and unity in the form of an exploration of Japanese film history and, in particular, its many depictions of armed conflict.

| Sep 8, 2021

Amid the excess and chaos of Labyrinth of Cinema, a stark, passionate message emerges: "a movie can change the future, if not the past."

| Sep 8, 2021

[Obayashi] immerses us in his final creation in much the same way that his teenaged protagonists here find themselves absorbed within the horrors and absurdities of the past.

| Jun 5, 2021

[A]t its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2021