The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jennie Punter

Turns out to be one of the most compelling, finely orchestrated and oddly enchanting films of the year so far.

San Francisco Chronicle by Reyhan Harmanci

Kurosawa's film is heavyweight fare: disturbing, slightly over the top, but satisfying, like a rich meal with a powerful aftertaste.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Known for distinctive horror movies like "Cure" and "Pulse," inventive Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds just the right melancholy tone to suit a new and all too familiar kind of horror: economic downsizing.

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

Bold, acutely observant and universal in its wide-ranging concerns and implications.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

Each performance in this plaintive work is superb, but Kyoko Koizumi's gently melancholy portrait of the businessman's wife keeps Tokyo Sonata true and affecting, even when the later passages go a little nuts.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

No, it doesn't turn into another horror film or a murder-suicide. It simply shows how lives torn apart by financial emergencies can be revealed as being damaged all along.

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

As always, Kurosawa masterfully controls his film's framing and sound design, and as always, the painstakingly precise mise-en-scene can feel a little overdone at times.

Village Voice

Kurosawa's abiding concern has always been the alienation of modern living, which he here merely transplants into a more recognizable domestic milieu, where subtle fissures in society's apparent order threaten to short-circuit people instead of their beloved technology.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama -- if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair -- there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.

Film Threat by Eric Campos

With Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa shows that he has quite the flair for dry humor and peppers this film with just the perfect amount.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

A disconcerting melange, Tokyo Sonata begins rather conventionally before spinning into black comic, almost fantastical, terrain.

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Although envisioned before the world economy went to hell, Tokyo Sonata is relevant to the mess we're in now.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

For all its oddities, this movie does carry weight, and, with more than eight per cent of Americans out of work, the timing of its release here could not be more acute.

Variety by Derek Elley

Though there's nothing here that hasn’t been dealt with in other Japanese movies, picture benefits considerably from its pitch-perfect performances.

The Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to the script which invests the smallest scenes with dramatic significance, Tokyo Sonata enthrals audiences for the first hour with the pacing of a thriller.

Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa switches gears from supernatural horror to poignant social satire.