In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Interesting if typically overlong multi-character drama with a wartime setting, about the exploits of an ageing and old-fashioned doctor (whose diagnosis for all his patients is always the same: hepatitis!) in a fishing community. Several enjoyable vignettes along the way: the young prostitute who becomes the doctor's aide but continues in her clandestine profession against his better judgment; the doctor's appearance at a Tokyo medical conference, in which he is moved to tears by the reception given him by the more illustrious colleagues present; the girl hiding an injured soldier who has escaped from a P.O.W. camp, involving the doctor and several other people from the village (who are later tortured by the authorities); the girl hunting a blue whale, in emulation of her legendary fisherman father, at the film's surprising and strangely beautiful climax - after which she and the doctor witness the historic blast of the atom bomb (which, to the latter appears in the form of an enlarged liver, a common trait of the dreaded hepatitis!).

Alas! I was hoping for more, actually thought there was something in store///Especially in troubled Japan, near the end of the Second World War./// Will the enemy avoid us or fight us/// If we contract typhoid or hepatitis?/// This movie is worst than just sore, this movie is one giant bore.

Imamura Shohei has come in to his prime at a point when most directors of his age begin their downward spiral. Along with his completely different although equally impressive film, "Unagi (the eel)" (1997) Imamura has made two of the greatest films of the 1990s. This particular entry into the Imamura canon deals with a Kyushu doctor during WWII. Of course, the film goes way beyond just that; it's a film that cannot be summed up in words, it's the kind of movie that you sit back and enjoy and you come out of smiling, for you've been entertained in a way most films cannot. "Kanzo Sensei" affects like a truly satisfying book does, something most films cannot come close to copying. If you dig it, rent "the eel" and look out for his next work coming soon to a theatre far from you and me--Japan. Let's hope his next one is as good as his last two, and that it is released in theatrically in the US. Highly recommended.

This movie is outstanding both as art and as philosophy. Artistically, Imamura has great range and is able to make quick switches of tone and style without losing the thread, or the audience. There is a similar yoking of divergent feelings in the relationship that develops between the two main characters. They are wildly incompatible to the end, yet together they form something that we know is right. Philosophically, Imamura does what no one in Hollywood would dare attempt. In the atmosphere of moral relativism that American films have promoted since the 60s, nothing is more preposterous than to hunger and thirst after justice. But Imamura's final film vindicates that hunger and makes us want to share it. The story's surprises are so intricately prepared that I can't say much more without ruining it, but I left the theater profoundly exhilarated.