Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

This is a wonderful, passionate, well-nigh unforgettable adaptation of a great novel about the horrors of love, and the wonderful fact that at least some of us live through it and come back for more.

San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson

Unabashedly weepy, lyrical in tone, and yet it cuts through the melodrama and stands as an honest depiction of young people who don't know all the answers but have the intellectual capacity to figure them out.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

There is something in the nature of director Tran Anh Hung, however, that seems to resist happy endings. In the emotional arc of his art, the high point seems to be bittersweet. It's sweet all the way up, wavers in dread and slides down to doom.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Admittedly lovely and heartfelt, Norwegian Wood is also hollow.

Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek

A movie like Norwegian Wood is a peculiar case – its intentions are sterling, and it's hard to pinpoint any technical flaws. The problem, maybe, is that it's trying too hard; Tran has such firm control over the storytelling that the resulting picture has no room to breathe.

Slant Magazine

Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.

Washington Post by Stephanie Merry

At times, the story seems to exist in the instant between wakefulness and sleep, a dreamy state that's also startlingly realistic.

Slant Magazine by Fernando F. Croce

Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.

The Hollywood Reporter

The fact that Norwegian Wood is based on Haruki Murakami's 1987 international best-seller should encourage many viewers to give this long, elegantly shot, sporadically involving Japanese film a try.

Empire

Murakami's 'unadaptability' for the screen is self-evident to fans of his books, but this is a noble if bleak first stab.

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

Fans of the book may resist the efforts of director Tran Anh Hung ("The Scent of Green Papaya"), simply because it would be impossible to capture the essence of Murakami's prose. But this exquisitely filmed, often haunting tragedy is worth taking on its own terms.

Time Out by David Fear

As a chronicle of grief and passion, however, the film is perilously close to being an exercise in tactile but touchy-feely passive-aggression.

Empire by Andrew Male

Murakami's 'unadaptability' for the screen is self-evident to fans of his books, but this is a noble if bleak first stab.

The A.V. Club by Sam Adams

Tran's visual precision is betrayed by his jumbled script, which fails to impose a cinematic structure on the source material.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.

Variety by Justin Chang

Lovely but listless.

Village Voice

Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.