Rating: 
Summary: it's really 4 and 1/2 stars
Review: Jeff Shannon in the editorial review really does justice to this movie in his 3 paragraphs.the "Reviewer: A viewer from Miami, Florida" misses the point. you don't compare this movie to "reality" to validate its value--you don't do that with most art/holywood movies either. the big strength of this movie is its artistic representation of what happens in real life: how one entraps onself in a given situation and then meaning is generated anew. this is a very human(istic) characteristic present throughout our history. i am retaining 1/2 of a star for the not so smooth technical realization of this great movie. as for the eroticism lable slaped throughout you may well ignore it.
Rating: 
Summary: Rent before you buy
Review: Not as profound as critics would have you believe. The story makes the basic point that prisoners sometimes come to love their prisons and never want to leave. It equates the prison (a sand pit) with male domestic life, including the use of a woman to represent the main domesticating factor. There is some correlation with the myth of Sisyphus, but the hero's pointless labor of shoveling sand is about surrending to a life of banality, not about punishment. Unfortunately, the film sacrifices some logic to make its point by having the two main characters trapped in a pit that we can see they could escape from by simply letting the sand fill in and staying on top of it until they're able to walk out. Some of the dialogue (or maybe the translation) is ridiculous: "It's like sitting on a giant suction pump," the hero thinks at one point after realizing the desert sand beneath his house draws moisture from the nearby sea through capillary action. I nor anyone I know has ever sat on a giant suction pump (though I think some people around my office might like to try). Maybe it's a Japanese thing. On a more positive note, there is an amazingly primitive scene where the villagers are wearing demon masks and beating drums while taunting the hero to rape the woman he's trapped with in the pit (on the promise that they will let him out), and the very last scene is genuinely "haunting", as they say, using Abe's familiar theme of the average working man voluntarily vanishing from his life and never returning (as in his book, The Ruined Map). Technically, the DVD version is poor except for the new easy-to-read subtitles. The film is scarred and jumps abruptly in places, though nowhere near as badly as Pushing Hands (Ang Lee's first film), another recent title from Image Entertainment. It seems Image is doing little to advance the cause of DVD, unlike Criterion's excellent restoration of The Third Man. Others obviously treasure this film and you may become one of them, but I found it only somewhat moving. Its Sixth Sense-ish final moment is probably worth the drudge, but just barely. For those without money to burn, I strongly recommend trying to rent it before you consider buying.
Rating: 
Summary: Inimitable sexual horror film from Japan.
Review: Nothing else like this has ever been made. The only other highly charged sexual drama that involves the natural world in such an insidious way, that I can recall, is the excellent Angels and Insects. But this is far more remarkable than that movie. The photography is beautiful, at times concentrating on the impeding drifts of sand as the entomologist is conscripted by the eerie woman of the title to prevent her home from being consumed. Believe it or not, this is practically the entire plot. The sand patterns, sometimes drifting like silk, sometimes collapsing in damp crusts, are gorgeous and terrifying. The woman herself is equally ineluctable and passively frightening. The man cannot escape from his deceptively simple entrapment. I won't even begin to imagine how this bodes for Abe or Teshigahara's conception of the male/female relationship, but the tight focus of this movie, the world within a world, is mind-boggling and fascinating, a hell much like the claustrophobic hotel room of Sartre's No Exit. You must see this.
Rating:
Summary: Dummies need not apply ....
Review: Ok so if you are reading movie reviews of a 1964 subtitled B&W film from a Japanese director you may already have passed the test. I bought this film since it was advertised as haunting, erotic and unforgettable. Two out of three ain't bad since I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since seeing woman in the dunes yesterday afternoon. The imagery in the movie is out of this world as a young entymologist (studies bugs) wants to escape the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and find a bug in the dunes of a rmote part of Japan that will make him famous. The bug he discovers is himself as, after missing the bus, he dropped into a sand pit in the dunes to help a young woman contiually dig the sand out of the hole while the villagers keep them fed just like worker bugs. Seems like the poor vilagers decided this was the cheapest way for them to avoind the sand dunes taking over the whole village. It doesn't take long for our hero to realize that he's been tricked and he is now in about the same situation as one of the sand bugs he hunts for. (The director spoon feeds us several scenes in which the camera takes a super close ups of skin and hair that looks not unlike bug pictures on a museum wall) Although excape is not impossible our hero undergoes a metamorphisis as he discovers that he got there since he wanted to escape from it all and he certainly did. The inevitablility of sex in the dune is of course fulfilled but I got the distinct impression that our hero never really falls in love with the woman in the dunes but rather begins to understand her and the inevitability of her life. The final decision then was his to make ....
Rating:
Summary: Dummies need not apply ....
Review: Ok so if you are reading movie reviews of a 1964 subtitled B&W film from a Japanese director you may already have passed the test. I bought this film since it was advertised as haunting, erotic and unforgettable. Two out of three ain't bad since I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since seeing woman in the dunes yesterday afternoon. The imagery in the movie is out of this world as a young entymologist (studies bugs) wants to escape the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and find a bug in the dunes of a rmote part of Japan that will make him famous. The bug he discovers is himself as, after missing the bus, he dropped into a sand pit in the dunes to help a young woman contiually dig the sand out of the hole while the villagers keep them fed just like worker bugs. Seems like the poor vilagers decided this was the cheapest way for them to avoind the sand dunes taking over the whole village. It doesn't take long for our hero to realize that he's been tricked and he is now in about the same situation as one of the sand bugs he hunts for. (The director spoon feeds us several scenes in which the camera takes a super close ups of skin and hair that looks not unlike bug pictures on a museum wall) Although excape is not impossible our hero undergoes a metamorphisis as he discovers that he got there since he wanted to escape from it all and he certainly did. The inevitablility of sex in the dune is of course fulfilled but I got the distinct impression that our hero never really falls in love with the woman in the dunes but rather begins to understand her and the inevitability of her life. The final decision then was his to make ....
Rating:
Summary: simply a masterpiece
Review: Or maybe not so simply! For those who believe that film must express its content, above all, visually, this may be the greatest movie ever made. It's certainly in my top ten--in fact, in my top two. It is mesmerizing.
Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Film!
Review: Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes came to me at a time 30 years ago when I was watching 3-4 foreign films every week for about a year. For me, it remains a powerful film that has stayed cemented in my mind all these years. Universal and contemporary, it spellbinds the viewer with lyrical, sensuous b&w imagery. The story is allegorical. It focuses on what really binds a man and a woman together: lust and love and purpose. The trapped man's intellectual pursuits change from collecting dead insects to collecting life-saving water. Everything the man needs to be happy and satisfied ultimately becomes clear to him. He "frees" himself from the anomie and sterility of modern life by learning to live a purposeful existence based on emotional and physical needs. He no longer wants to escape his existence in the sand, for the sand prison, and all that it has to offer, frees him forever.
Rating:
Summary: Quality Lasts
Review: Thirty years ago I saw this film for the first time, and for thirty years I've remembered the beautiful cinematography and the haunting images. I just went back and watched the DVD, afraid that it couldn't be as good as I remembered. It is.
An entomologist searches the desert for unknown beetles, hoping to achieve fame. Comfortable and careless, he assumes that he is in control of his world. Suddenly everything is reversed and he is trapped as completely as the beetles he arranges in display boxes. Wonderful to see a movie that talks about life in human and humane terms, instead of a plot-heavy paint-by-numbers formula from Hollywood. Watching at 20, I saw a parable about the precariousness of life and how easily a wrong step could doom a person to a life of drudgery. Now, at 50, the images of being trapped in the relentlessness of work seems less connected to the sand trap our hero finds himself in, and more a condition of life itself. By world standards those of us with DVDs and the leisure to watch them are wealthy indeed, but still the need to do the work that the world confronts us with remains. Work and eat. Don't work, don't eat. It's a simple reality that Teshigahara treats with compassion, dignity and beauty.
Rating:
Summary: Highly unusual film, not for everyone, but interesting .
Review: This highly unusual film, in Japanese, with English subtitles, features a man and woman, trapped in a dune, forced to shovel sand and their complex relationship. Although not for everyone, it does have some surpising elements to it. Violence, lust, sex (though limited by today's standards, and even a little nudity, mostly the male; though some shots of the woman, but as I say, it was 1964) [there was one scene, which I found in a movie book, isn't shown, or at least I didn't see it in the movie, unless it was an outtake, or was quickly shot; showing the woman's face and one breast, I'd have to check, but it wasn't essential to the story.] Anyway, he tries to escape, but it's the woman who leaves, though he does too (finally). Unless one speaks and understands Japanese, one might need to glance quickly between the subtitles and the movie, other than that, interesting.
Rating:
Summary: a strange film
Review: This is a very strange but emotionally captivating film. I haven't been able to stop recreating it in my mind.It suggests to me that one can become accustomed to physical pain when the reference to a state of well-being is lost. But existential pain is different because we're essentially adrift in a sea of our own "me-ness". There are no reference points in the "ego". We're lost without knowing it so it never occurs to us to "look" for ourselves. The discovery of the main character that someone he has grown close to is in severe pain, is his first lesson in compassion. Perhaps it is also an opening into awareness.
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