Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
As an elegy to a perfect fusion of directorial mastery and an actor’s indomitable screen presence, it’s hard to imagine something more memorable and affecting than Red Beard.
The New Yorker by Michael Sragow
In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
I believe this film should be seen by every medical student. Like Kurosawa's masterpiece, "Ikiru" (1952), it fearlessly regards the meanings of life, and death.