Reviews

• The Sun sheds only so much literal light on its chosen subject; it's a film of shadows and silence, the calm before and after the storm. But everything you see and hear carries weight and an eerie poetic undercurrent.

  Michael Phillips - The Chicago Tribune
  
  19 January 2013

• Sokurov, who also acted as director of photography, films the character and his surroundings with the eye of a newly arrived visitor to another world.

  Keith Uhlich - Time Out New York
  
  19 January 2013

• This 2005 masterpiece by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov transforms the story of Emperor Hirohito at the close of World War II into a melancholy meditation on power and its loss.

  Fred Camper - Chicago Reader
  
  19 January 2013

• The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.

  Manohla Dargis - The New York Times
  
  19 January 2013

• Though he successfully humanizes Hirohito, who is shown happily shedding his divinity, Sokurov doesn't entirely exonerate him. He contrives a shock ending that, as measured as everything else in this engrossing, supremely assured movie, acknowledges one last blood sacrifice on the emperor's altar.

  J. Hoberman - Village Voice
  
  19 January 2013