REVIEWS

"Forget a swan song: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s final film is a shriek, a tirade, a lecture and a rollicking action-adventure stuffed into a three-hour pop-art package."

- Devika Girish, The New York Times

"Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s last work starts as a sentimental elegy to cinema-going’s golden age but takes us through the heart of Japanese darkness"

- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"In this three-hour-long, exuberantly shot (by cinematographer Hisaki Sanbongi) and imaginatively edited film, the full force of Obayashi’s preference for the experimental makes itself felt. Its visual panache is achieved by casually switching between color and black-and-white images, live action and CGI, and shuffling a variety of old-time movies and genres... "

- Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter

"Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests."

- William Repass, Slant Magazine

"Obayashi (1938-2020) delivers an extended fantasia spiked with motifs and ideas from his own long filmography, including time-travel, young sweethearts in peril, interactions between humans, fictional characters and ghosts, a tribute to hand-drawn animation and pastiches of silent-movie grammar...."

- Tony Rayns, Sight & Sound

"On his out way the door, Nobuhiko Obayashi left us wondering how he got all the way from “House” to here without losing faith in humanity and his art"

- Simon Abrams, Roger Ebert

"Instead of a feeble final effort by a dying man, “Labyrinth of Cinema” is bursting with energy, passion and dreamlike invention, and while conveying a strong antiwar message, it is anything but preachy. The tone is that of a cheeky black comedy — minus the cynicism — while the border between reality and fantasy dissolves into a colorful alternative universe that is uniquely Obayashi’s."

- Mark Schilling, The Japan Times

"Foremost among these interests is the vitality and dreams of youth....the film’s recreations of approximately a dozen different styles of filmmaking [are] deliberately uncanny, a gap which points to its level of metatext. Past, present, and future are indistinguishable inside the projector..."

- Ryan Swen, Hyperallergic

"Labyrinth of Cinema is a true epic, which uses its three-hour runtime as a fully immersive playground of cinematic experiments... It’s a definitive final statement by Obayashi, and a confrontation of our ideas of what movies are (a lie), what they represent (a truth), and how we distinguish between the two."

- Soham Gadre, Film Inquiry

"... Labyrinth of Cinema is both a summation of Obayashi’s craft and a literal homecoming. The film is a magnum opus that beautifully blends two prominent aspects of the director’s existing body of work: It platforms the feverish carnage reflective of Obayashi’s existing anti-war films while contrasting the idyllic setting of Onomichi for greater effect. "

- Natalia Keogan, Paste Magazine

AWARDS

Best Director, #2 Film of the Year, Kinema Junpo Awards

Special Achievement Award, Tokyo International Film Festival 2019.

"In order to underline the eternal freedom exhibited in his work, as well as the playful chaos of a film that revisits the history of Japan through its cinema, the jury wishes to award a special mention to LABYRINTH OF CINEMA by the late Nobuhiko Obayashi.”

Special Jury Mention, Fantasia International Film Festival 2020

Rotterdam International Film Festival (2020)

Groningen International Film Festival Rotterdam (2020)

Helsinki Cine Aasia Film Festival (2020)

Nippon Connection (2020)

Udine Far East Film Festival (2020)

Taipei Film Festival (2020)

Japan Cuts (2020)

Shanghai International Film Festival (2020)

New From Japan (2020)

Slash Fantastic Film Festival (2020)

Japan Film Festival of Los Angeles (2020)

Black Canvas Contemporary Film Festival (2020) *Competition

Brisbane International Film Festival (2020)

Silk Road International Film Festival (2020)

Vladivostok International Film Festival (2020)

Australia Japan Film Festival (2020)

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (2020)