Kokuho

Reviewers were broadly won over by this decades-spanning portrait of a Kabuki actor's rise, calling it a lavish, deeply felt piece of craft. The kabuki performance sequences draw particular praise for their intensity and visual control, and the central performance anchoring the film's back half is widely singled out as career-defining, with the veteran actor playing a mentor/father figure earning similarly strong notice. Design, cinematography, and the film's willingness to let a familiar coming-of-age-through-art story breathe over a long runtime all register as strengths.

The most consistent reservation is structural: critics note that the film's momentum and character focus, so confident in its first stretch, loosen as the decades-spanning story accumulates time jumps, and that some threads and motivations become harder to track as a result. A few reviewers frame this as a matter of the film not always deciding whether it's more interested in its characters' interior lives or in the performances themselves, which contributes to a sense of the back half dragging relative to the opening.

Where critics diverge is less about whether the craft impresses — that's close to consensus — and more about how much the loosened structure costs the film emotionally; some feel the accumulated years of story still land with full weight, others feel the drift in focus blunts what could have been a more devastating whole. Underneath both readings is shared interest in the film's themes of inherited obligation, rivalry-as-brotherhood, and what sustained devotion to a craft actually costs the person underneath it.