Dreams will knock your eyes out without ignoring the mind and heart.
– Peter Travers,
Rolling Stone,
12 May 2001
fresh:
It's something altogether new for Kurosawa, a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future. The magical and mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical.
– Vincent Canby,
New York Times,
20 May 2003
rotten:
Only during a final procession does the old Kurosawa magic get a brief look-in, but by then the hackneyed moralising and dramatic languor have ensured that, despite the well-meaning message, it's hard to care.
– Geoff Andrew,
Time Out,
24 Jun 2006
rotten:
In the uneven career of Akira Kurosawa, two limiting factors were sentimentality and preachiness, and both come to the fore in this 1990 collection of eight dreams.