Cloud

"A masterful psychological thriller."

— Mark Schilling, Japan Times

"Genuinely one of the most unpredictable and fun films of the year."

— Kyle Pinion, Screen Rex

"Cloud is a sophisticated send-up of social commerce culture."

— Adam Nayman, The Ringer

"This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots."

— David Ehrlich, IndieWire

"A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest."

— Rory O'Connor, The Film Stage

"Kurosawa crafts both an actionized neo-noir and a brooding portrait of a rapacious online marketplace."

— Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review

"Cloud is a portrait of merciless 21st-century commerce and social cruelty that’s filtered through various genre lenses."

— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

"Cloud ends up playing like an outrageous riff on Assault on Precinct 13, blurring the line between action spectacle and home-invasion horror."

— A.A. Dowd, Digital Trends

"That tension between modes [of realism and online fantasy] gives Cloud tremendous visceral and intellectual force, plus a persistent air of moral inquiry."

— Justin Chang, The New Yorker

"A master of existential dread, Kurosawa was early to posit a creepy side to online culture... Things have gotten even grimmer in Cloud. The malevolence is not supernatural but human."

— John Powers, NPR

"Kurosawa’s latest film is a chilly and mystifying expression of a modern malevolence which hangs over our lives — like a cloud, if you will — worsened by constant digital connection."

— Kambole Campbell, Empire Magazine

"Playing like a slicker, more vicious riff on Ben Wheatley’s Mexican stand-off film, Free Fire, the climactic gunplay chaos is all the more chilling for the impotence ultimately behind so much of the rage being vented."

— Josh Slater-Williams, Little White Lies

"Unfolding at a hauntingly subdued register before unleashing its pent-up tension during its final act, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud skewers the anonymity that characterizes our presence in online spaces."

— Zachary Lee, Chicago Reader

"Bitter self-reflection, coupled with such bold experimentation with action, tone, and genre, makes Cloud’s brooding, brutal tale of resellers wreaking havoc on humanity one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best films to date."

— Julian Singleton, Cinapse

"At once, a morality play on vengeance and retribution, a cautionary tale against capitalistic pursuit of success at the cost of others, and an immaculately crafted work by one of the great, most distinct directors working today."

— Calvin Law, The Asian Cut

"For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us."

— Brandon Yu, New York Times

"Cloud reaffirms Kurosawa’s status as one of Japan’s most essential filmmakers, one who consistently reinvents himself at every turn and ensures that we will be unable to shake it off by the time the film’s final image burns our retina forever."

— Maxance Vincent, Awards Radar

"Kurosawa’s aptitude for unnerving audiences through careful camerawork and creative framing is evident throughout Cloud, prompting us to scan every darkened corner onscreen, lest we miss a crucial, revelatory, or quietly horrifying detail."

— Toussaint Egan, IGN Movies

"Kurosawa inches back toward the knotted-stomach dread of his horror classics Cure and Pulse with Cloud, albeit accented this time with a healthily morbid sense of humour. And, perhaps more surprising, a serious affinity for action movie shoot-outs."

— Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail