Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Andres-Camara I assume that for them these stories will be known and nothing would collide, I half of the film had to be thinking that he wanted to tell me. While it is true that I am very analytical and when things are abstract I miss a bit. But this film for me is very abstract and that pulls me out.Finally I would say that I do not think it is bad as other films, it is done seriously, but its ingredients I do not like. So for my taste I do not approve.Spoiler: This is what you ask me when I finish watching the movie. It is a paranoia of the director or it is me who has become such a dog that I have been lost.You're watching the movie and you do not know if it's so badly made that it looks like theater or that they did not know how to do it better, but if it was so, it should have been all like that, not just part of the story. I imagine that being Japanese cinema, I will not understand their ways of seeing things, their stories, their times, because if, as always this cinema, it is not that it is slow, it is that it does not know the word ellipsis. A fantastic wardrobe that if, as always and some actors, also as always overacted, there will be who loves, I find it heavy.If it were not because it happens and it seems to be theater, the photograph would be very beautiful, but when it happens, it happens to be theater, the problem is that we are watching cinema. It is like the address, luckily it is not a sum of fast planes, but a sum of generals does not say much either.I assume that for them these stories will be known and nothing would collide, I half of the film had to be thinking that he wanted to tell me. While it is true that I am very analytical and when things are abstract I miss a bit. But this film for me is very abstract and that pulls me out.Finally I would say that I do not think it is bad as other films, it is done seriously, but its ingredients I do not like. So for my taste I do not approve.

MortalKombatFan1 This horror anthology made by Toho Studios in the 1960's is one of the more beautiful and eerie than it is scary. Based on four Japanese folk tales, the film has an air of artifice about it, using colourful lighting (which changes mid-scene for supernatural effect), fancy period costumes and makeup, and massive set-pieces (wheat fields and show covered forests are reproduced on the stage, an elaborate sea battle is shown against a painted backdrop). It was one of the most expensive movies made in Japan at the time, and it shows. With so much style, it could be said that the film is an exercise in excess, but really, the style lends itself perfectly to each story, and makes the images from these old tales fresh and unique even fifty years on.The first story, "Black Hair" shows a man leaving his wife to pursue wealth in the city by re-marrying the daughter of rich clan. He is happy at first, but when he thinks back about the woman he loved which he abandoned, revisiting their old abandoned homestead haunts him, literally. In "The Woman and the Snow", two men are stuck in a snow storm, and after his partner freezes to death at the hands of spirit in the form of a woman, he sees her and is spared. She tells him to never speak of seeing her to anyone and he can live. He does for a time, and meets a girl in a nearby village who looks suspiciously like her, only to fall in love with her and raise a family. After an intermission, the longest segment, "Hoichi, the Earless" follows. A blind minstrel, Hoichi, plays a song on the biwa about a fierce sea battle between two clans that ends in the death of a child emperor and his servants, who kill themselves by jumping overboard, rather than being captured by the enemy. Later, Hoichi is called upon by a ghost of the clan to come up upon a mountain top and sing their story to them forever. His disappearance from the monastery is noticed, and some monks are sent out to find him.The final story, "In a Cup of Tea", is an unfinished tale that acts as a coda to the film, being about an writer that must finish a story in time for his publisher and writes one about a man who drinks a cup of tea with the face of person in it. The person in the tea comes to life and visits him at his home over several nights, once by himself and then another time sending his guards. Only the tea drinking man can see the apparitions, which disappear and reappear every time he strikes them in fear. Does he go mad in the end? It is never said. It shouldn't work as an ending, but it does.Each tale acts as a sort of morality play, warning against the dangers of following strangers, or being mislead by women. They're deeply entrenched in folklore and eastern mysticism, and the grandiose camera work and haunting score by Toru Takemitsu make "Kwaidan" a very fine, if stately paced, ghost story anthology. The best segment is "Hoichi, the Earless", with its elongated prologue which is entirely sung by the main character, explaining the story to follow. "The Woman and the Snow" is a sort of love story which is beautiful and sort of tragic, and "Black Hair" has a justifiably bitter conclusion, which is also the scariest of the films.

gavin6942 A collection of four Japanese folk tales with supernatural themes.In his Harakiri review, Roger Ebert described Kwaidan as "an assembly of ghost stories that is among the most beautiful films I've seen". True, Roger, true. A beautiful film, one of the best Japanese films, and probably the single best Japanese horror film ever made. Everything that came out of Japanese later (in the 1990s) owes a little something to this film.Sure, you could say, "But wait, the greatest Japanese horror film is Godzilla." And there is plenty of truth to that. But Godzilla is a whole other category, both in and outside of horror. There was really never anything scary about giant monsters beating on each other.

tomgillespie2002 Based on the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, who studied Japanese folklore and supernatural tales to form his novel Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Kwaidan tells four stories, all varying in length, tone, and quality. The first, The Black Hair, depicts a samurai who abandons his loving wife in search of a rise in the social hierarchy, marrying into wealth after displaying his fine gift for archery on horseback. Spending years in deep regret, he returns back to his first wife only to find her physically the same, yet entirely different. The second, The Woman of the Snow, is a very simplistic tale of a man's encounter with the Yuki-onna, a pale woman with blue lips who lives in the snow, who warns the man that she would kill him if he told anyone about her.The stand-out segment is undoubtedly the third, Hoichi the Earless, a sweeping epic (in a portmanteau context) tale of a blind musician, Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura), who's rendition of The Tale of the Heike (a multi-layered account of the long-standing conflict between the Taira and Minamoto clans in 12th century Japan), has gained him renown. The ghost of a warrior that perished during the decisive Battle of Dan-no- ura approaches Hoichi, informing him that his lord has demanded his presence in order to hear his legendary performance. After frequently disappearing during the night, Hoichi is followed and is seen to be playing to a graveyard full of ghosts. The fourth, which is the shortest, is the unfinished story In a Cup of Tea.Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 1965 Academy Awards, Kwaidan is a masterwork of visual splendour, using bold explosions of colour, Expressionist sets, and dream-like, almost fairytale lighting. Hoichi the Earless begins with a beautiful re-telling of the Battle of Dan-no- ura, with lavish red and orange back-drops juxtaposed with the microscopically detailed artwork from the period, making it seem almost like a painting come to life, all with the sound of Hoichi's beautiful rendition of The Tale of the Heike. This comes straight after the rather gloomy Woman of the Snow, which uses blue lighting amidst a snowy terrain to create the most haunting of the tales on show.Yet Kwaidan is much more than visual elegance. It is deeply rooted in Japanese folk-lore, bringing to mind the Western tales of the Brothers Grimm, back when fairy-tales had a darker tone and social context. It is almost like lying in bed on a thunderous night reading ghost stories by candle-light. Director Makasi Kobayashi (director of The Human Condition trilogy (1959-1961) and Harakiri (1962)) seems especially fascinated and enchanted by these tales, giving each story its own visual style and colour scheme, and even dedicating the final segment to the many unfinished Japanese stories that end abruptly, shrouded in mystery, and ponders the fate of its author.Running at three hours, Kwaidan never feels strained or tired, and doesn't waste a second of its running time to create something you could easily freeze-frame and hang on your wall. Hoichi the Earless could have been a masterpiece on its own, and is the most fondly remembered of the quartet (the image of Hoichi screaming, clutching his butchered head has become iconic amongst fans of more obscure, art-house 'horror'). The final story does end the film on a sadly quite anti-climactic note however, being by far the poorest of the stories, telling a slightly silly, un-involving twenty-minute story about the reflection of a mysterious man in a cup of tea that appears later to a confused samurai. It jars with what came before, slightly ruining what is a nigh-on perfect trilogy of beautifully rendered films.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com