Metacritic reviews

Miyazaki is at the peak of his visual craftsmanship here, alternating lush, boldly colored rural vistas with epic, crowded urban canvases, soaring aerial perspectives and test flights both majestic and ill-fated.

A very honest film from a great Japanese artist.

Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.

It might not be the director's most immediately accessible films, but it's among his most fascinating and beguiling.

As gorgeously animated as any of his previous movies, Wind has Miyazaki trading in his more fantastical impulses for contemplative, old-fashioned drama and period detail.

The grim subtext of The Wind Rises goes largely unacknowledged, leading to a gaping hole in this otherwise beautifully realized narrative that celebrates the power of curiosity as a motivating force.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

An emotionally generous and expansively detailed romantic fantasy.

A gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.

Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.