Metacritic reviews

This riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.

A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest.

The action isn't elegant. It's erratic and loud and ugly. . . it's a symphony of chaos. It's also a damn good time, even if Kurosawa leaves us with the haunting notion that we're all too connected, just one click away from finding opportunity or something much more dangerous.

If you’ve ever wished ill towards a scalper, Kurosawa has the film for you. But this darkly comic thriller also skewers those who flirt with fantasies of vengeance from behind supposed anonymity.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.

Is any of this believable? Not really. Is some of it plain silly? Definitely. But it’s mostly enjoyable to watch, even if the film flies so far off the rails that there’s less suspense here than in the director’s stronger works.

An offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels.

A film of two halves, Cloud’s excessive, bullet-strafed second section is more effective than the restrained and sluggish first part. The themes it explores are uncomfortably of the moment.

Kurosawa creates such an eerie atmosphere in the first hour of Cloud that watching it crumble into more generic action territory is challenging, and feels like a miscalculation. It doesn’t help that much of the action in the second half isn’t particularly interesting.

The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.