Metacritic reviews

As music documentaries go, it’s one of the quietest you’ll see – but it’ll be ringing in my soul for a long while yet.

Not only a portrait of a great artist, but a sensitive and engrossing depiction of the act of creation and its process.

The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.

The movie sidesteps the conventional breadth of a documentary subject’s resume. We learn nothing about Sakamoto’s early years, and little about his private life. Yet simply by lingering with his pensive, compelling subject at the keyboard, or engaging Sakamoto (discreetly) in his thoughts on his life and his music, Schible casts a spell and captures the spirit of a uniquely gifted composer.

This is a gentle, reflective portrait that seldom gets personal and yet somehow feels quite candid.

With a light touch but deep reserves of respect for fans both old and new Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is an extremely fitting portrait of the influential composer. There’s an air of patience that presides over director Stephen Schible’s footage, even during a period that presents a lot of tumultuous questions for his seemingly unflappable subject.

Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.

In interposing haunting footage of the destructive wake of the Fukushima tragedy with Sakamoto’s evident, childlike delight in coming up with the perfect tonal combinations, the film serves as a stirringly poetic meditation on the pursuit of creation in the face of mortality.

It’s a handsomely crafted portrait overall, yet one whose middleweight content flatters the subject without ultimately quite doing him justice.

Stephen Schible’s documentary portrait follows the musician in the calm and introspective period forced on him – but it also shows him participating in post-Fukushima demonstrations.