Dolls soon becomes overloaded with symbolism, and consequently suffocates the audience.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Los Angeles Times by Carina Chocano
The movie's pace is appropriate to its mood, which is crisp, melancholy and gently cruel.
Despite an excessively meandering final act, the drama's three intertwined stories have a cumulative impact, their affecting sadness matched by meticulously composed visual poetry.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Whether this measured exercise in romantic melancholy moves you to tears or bores you to them is probably a matter of personal susceptibility to the sting of bitter regret for love lost.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Dolls risks the bank on symbology as gaudy as teen anime and as heavy as a stone temple.
New York Daily News by Robert Dominguez
Rife with beautiful imagery and loads of symbolism, though none of the stories is particularly compelling on its own.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
With some staggeringly beautiful photography of cherry blossoms and scarlet autumn leaves, Dolls is so enthralled with its own cinematography that it can't bear to edit itself, and during the autumn and winter segments of the bound beggars' journey, it almost reaches a standstill.
Lush and poetic, Dolls proves once again that Kitano is one of the world's most original filmmakers.