 Ray 's work has been described as full of humanism and universality , and of a deceptive simplicity with deep underlying complexity . The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa said , " Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon . " But his detractors find his films glacially slow , moving like a " majestic snail . " Some find his humanism simple @-@ minded , and his work anti @-@ modern ; they criticize him for lacking the new modes of expression or experimentation found in works of Ray 's contemporaries , such as Jean @-@ Luc Godard . As Stanley Kauffman wrote , some critics believe that Ray assumes that viewers " can be interested in a film that simply dwells in its characters , rather than one that imposes dramatic patterns on their lives . " Ray said he could do nothing about the slow pace . Kurosawa defended him by saying that Ray 's films were not slow , " His work can be described as flowing <unk> , like a big river " . 
