Legend, adventure and poetry fuse to make this engrossing, if overlong, film material.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.
This is one of the greats, and I’m too much in awe of it to say much more than: See it—as often as you can.
Moving and atmospheric, this quest tale is among the best of its kind.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
It employs the power of tragedy to enrich.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
At some point during the watching, "Sansho the Bailiff" stops being a fable or a narrative and starts being a lament, and by that time it is happening to us as few films do.
Told with the stark simplicity of a fairy tale, Sansho The Bailiff demonstrates how compassion can overcome the forces of hatred and oppression, and shows how trying it is to remain decent and humane in an inhospitable world.
Cinema's greatest humanist with his most direct statement