Eight re-creations of the Japanese director's unconscious dreams. All are so limpid, so economical, so tidy -- so much so as to cast doubts on the authenticity of their origins or the accuracy of their re-creations -- that the viewer is able to feel like Freud's brightest disciple. Death would seem to be the dominant and pervasive motif, quite understandably in an anthology of dreams compiled by an artist past the age of eighty. And no one with warm feelings for the man will be able to watch without sorrow this series of variations on that theme: the inexpiable sin, the irremediable guilt, the imminent end, the unrecoverable past. At least some of this sorrow must in honesty be ascribed to something in the nature of diminished capacity. The simplicity and directness of expression, the slow pace that so frequently threatens to turn into a grinding halt, the air of detachment and lack of visceral involvement -- much of this could, to a degree, be excused as an attempt at verisimilitude in the rendering of dreams. But it could to an equal degree be faulted on the very same grounds. These are highly digested dreams. And there can be no built-in excuse for the rampant solemnity and grandiosity that did so much damage, also, to Kurosawa's Ran and Kagemusha. These qualities are to be adamantly differentiated from the mere ruminativeness and savoringness of his Dersu Uzala and Dodes'ka-den: markedly an old man's movies already, in 1975 and '70 respectively. With Akira Terao, Chishu Ryu, and Martin Scorsese (as Vincent Van Gogh). (1990) — Duncan Shepherd