The reviews are unanimous in their praise and unusually consistent about why. Nearly every critic describes the same thing: long stretches of stillness broken by sudden, brutal violence, with deadpan humour running underneath. The praise clusters on Kitano himself, as director and as the taciturn lead, and on the way his own paintings are worked into the story of a former detective caring for a dying wife. Several also single out the composition, the melancholic score and the elliptical structure.
The spread is narrow and nobody dislikes it; the differences are of temperature. The most enthusiastic reviews treat it as a significant step forward for Kitano. The cooler ones, from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, admire the originality and the sparing use of violence but stop short of the rapture found elsewhere. Slant Magazine is alone in naming sentimentality, particularly in the scenes with the wife, though it counts this as part of the design rather than a fault.