Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence 1983

Janet Maslin, New York Times: Mr. Oshima has staged the film in a spacious tropical setting and filled it with a great number of extras. Even so, Mr. Bowie always stands out from the crowd. Read more

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader: The context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Here's a movie that is even stranger than it was intended to be. Read more

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: The Merry Christmas catalogue of atrocities finally becomes numbing, even ludicrous. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: For all the praise heaped upon Oshima's admittedly ambitious film about East-West relations in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp during World War II, it's far less satisfactory than most of his earlier work. Read more

Variety: Read more

Aaron Hillis, Village Voice: From Oshima's later career... most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java. Read more