FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

roland-scialom The life that people live here around, has a lot to do with the following verses of a famous and beautiful poem by Louis Aragon."Noting is taken for granted to man. Neither his strength Neither his weakness neither his heart. And when he believes that he opens his arms, his shadow has the shape of a cross. And when he believes that he seized his happiness, he smashes it. His life is a strange and a painful divorce.There is no happy love"Note particularly: "His life is a strange and painful divorce"While Trudi was alive, Rudi made no effort to "bring his soul close to hers" (I do not know how to say it otherwise), I mean they were married, loved each other, were faithful, but "their souls were not married."After Trudi dies, Rudi realizes this, and is desolate.He finds a way to "help souls to get close to each other" through a fortuitous encounter with a girl who is a street performer. This girl has more of an angel than someone of flesh and blood, because during the relationship with Rudi, completely free from any interest - she is a homeless, living under a tarp in a public garden, and is apparently alone in the world - she gives to Rudi, as a present, the art of dancing with the shadows, with the ephemeral and with people who are no longer among the people alive. In other words, she gave to Rudi, for free, a key which may help Trudi to rediscover and "save his soul."Imagine, to find an angel in the midst of the madness that is the life in Tokyo!On the other hand, Trudi loved Butoh but could never practice it, because of the total disinterest of Rudi and this was certainly one of the sorrows that she carried with her when she died.Rudi takes that key and succeed to meet Trudi in some ineffable dimension, where she is now.The film is really beautiful. Everything and everybody are perfect. It made me weep a lot because of the atmosphere of "painful divorce" in which plunged the life of Rudi and Trudi, and because of the beauty of Rudi's relationship with the angel of Butoh.

cintact This is the film Sofia Coppola could only dream of making, a far more sophisticated and sensitive LOST IN TRANSLATION. Dorie's visual cues play out beautifully throughout her film as the narrative unfolds. Her dedication toward representing the Japanese in a much more respectful and flattering light allows her character transcend cultural barriers and lose himself in the beauty of Japan. At first, one would question yet another film where a man goes to an adult bar in Tokyo, but outside all of the "strangeness" he initially perceives, the film ends up taking an intelligent and poetic turn. What at first seems to be more like TOKYO STORY builds into a meditation on mourning and transformation. Cultural differences provide an opportunity for finding understanding, something Coppola completely seemed to be incapable of. The young Japanese dancer in the film is charming. Through her, this encounter becomes more than a fling through the city, but an opportunity to come to terms with life and death.

Roland E. Zwick When her husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness, a German woman named Trudi decides it's time the both of them paid a long overdue visit to their adult children - two of whom live in Berlin and one in Japan. The catch is that the husband, Rudi, doesn't even know he's sick and neither do the kids. Thus, Trudi must live with this horrible secret while putting on a brave face for those around her. But then a different, wholly unforeseen tragedy strikes the family and the movie heads off into an entirely new and utterly unanticipated direction from where we thought it was going.A German movie set largely in Japan, "Cherry Blossoms" is a beautiful and heartbreaking film about living for the moment and of not putting off till tomorrow what you can do today. It's also marvelously perceptive about the dynamics of parent/child relationships, especially when, as is true in this case, the parents are viewed by their self-absorbed offspring more as burdens to be endured than blessings to be cherished. The irony is that Rudi and Trudi have more in common with - and indeed are treated better by - many of the strangers and casual acquaintances they come in contact with than they are by their own children.But the movie is also an examination of marriage and of how partners can become so entwined with one another as a couple that they lose their identities as individuals, missing out on the dreams and goals they had for their lives when they were still young and unattached. This is certainly the case for Trudi, who has harbored a lifelong desire to take up Japanese dancing, a desire that Rudi, in his selfish indifference, has pretty much squelched in her for the duration of their marriage. Such a realization of lost opportunities can lead to regrets, recriminations and despair at the end of the road, yet in the case of Rudi and Trudi, one learns that lesson a little too late - and the other just in the nick of time.Elmer Wepper and Hannelore Elsner are magnificent as the aged couple, superbly capturing the deep-seated but often unspoken love that each spouse has for the other. A fine supporting cast, led by Maximilian Bruckner as one of their sons and Aya Irizuki as a young street artist who befriends Rudi in his time of greatest need, adds to the movie's richness. Another crucial element in the emotional force of the movie is the richly elegiac score by Claus Bantzer.The glory of this exquisitely realized and profoundly moving film is its willingness to grapple with some truly major issues - of life and death, of sorrow and loss, of filial and marital relationships - without getting heavy-handed and preachy about it in the process. Every moment in this film feels real and unforced, yet the movie itself has the minutely worked-out grace and precision of Japanese performance art (which we see quite a bit of throughout the course of the film). In fact, near the end, there is a fantasy dance sequence that is, quite frankly, one of the most utterly spellbinding scenes I've come across in ages.Masterfully directed by Doris Dorrie, "Cherry Blossoms" is a lyrical and unforgettable work that takes its place among the truly outstanding films of recent times.

krzysiektom I think it was for me a sublime movie experience. I tells about many things: lack of communication between generations, the passing of life and the necessity to cherish it while it lasts, the cultural differences and similarities between Germany and Japan. It also describes how we often do not know well even those closest to us. In the beginning the old couple seems so boring, one-sided and uninvolving, boy does it change as the film unravels. The film is very well written, directed and acted. Also one of the best, wholest descriptions of the current life in Japan I ever saw on celluloide. I loved the character of the young girl in Japan, her wonderful, delicate dignity in the face of the horrors of her lonely life. The man entered her life by coincidence and changed it for the better, maybe saving her from getting crazy or raped, or even killed.