[The Ceremony] is strictly for cineastes who can justify all sorts of incoherencies and inanities in the name of cult. This endless melodrama is, despite an interesting scene or two, strictly from the schmaltz-soap had-I-but-known school, and if its saga of the Sakurada family, recalled by a grandson who winds up its sole survivor, is a parable of Japanese history from 1946 to the present, it is a convoluted and tedious one. (p. 75)