Ghost in the Shell

It reviews better than it plays — admired more than it is enjoyed.

• “There are gripping chases and balletic combat scenes, painstakingly realised by Oshii’s animators, but the mood is mostly cold and melancholic, as Kusanagi broods over the fleshly implications of living in a world of data”

  Robbie Collin, The Telegraph · 100

• “It's not the mega-tech or the shootouts that make Ghost in the Shell memorable, but the ghostliness of it, its ability to convince us that Kusangai - no less than Rutger Hauer's strangely noble android in "Blade Runner" - has a human's ability to conceptualize her own mortality. Nor does arid intellectual speculation make Ghost in the Shell what it is. [1 Mar 1996, p.29]”

  Jay Carr, Boston Globe · 88

• “Technically, Ghost in the Shell is astonishing, not only for its smooth meld of cell animation and state-of-the-art computer animation, but also for its imaginative storytelling and mood-setting (thanks to an eerie, non-thumping score by Kenji Kawai).”

  Richard Harrington, Washington Post · 88

• “The movie trades in familiar virtual realities. Yet as realized by the gifted director Mamoru Oshii, who imagines cityscapes melting into circuit boards, Ghost in the Shell is where virtual reality meets superrealism. [9 May 1996, p.C4]”

  Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer · 88

• “The plot is impossibly dense and the characters – perhaps appropriately – feel like little more than cyphers, but for sheer mind-expanding sci-fi strangeness this is hard to beat.”

  Tom Huddleston, Time Out London · 80