Slant Magazine

The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

I believe this film should be seen by every medical student. Like Kurosawa's masterpiece, "Ikiru" (1952), it fearlessly regards the meanings of life, and death.

Slant Magazine by Dan Jardine

The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away.

Entertainment Weekly

Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic.

Entertainment Weekly by Steve Daly

Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic.

Variety

It's hokum lifted to the highest denominator, the banal made into near art by great skill and craftsmanship by the Japanese master.

Chicago Reader

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

The New Yorker by Michael Sragow

In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.

Chicago Reader by Don Druker

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

It's hokum lifted to the highest denominator, the banal made into near art by great skill and craftsmanship by the Japanese master.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

As an elegy to a perfect fusion of directorial mastery and an actor’s indomitable screen presence, it’s hard to imagine something more memorable and affecting than Red Beard.

Time Out

A monumental hospital soap opera which looks exactly as though Kurosawa had taken a long look at Ben Casey and Dr Kildare, and decided that anything they could do he could do better.

TV Guide Magazine

Mifune is as great here as he ever has been.

TV Guide Magazine by Staff (Not Credited)

Mifune is as great here as he ever has been.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

A monumental hospital soap opera which looks exactly as though Kurosawa had taken a long look at Ben Casey and Dr Kildare, and decided that anything they could do he could do better.

The New York Times

Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.

The New York Times by Howard Thompson

Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.