Kore-eda listens to his characters' inner thoughts with the attentiveness of a piano tuner, and reveals them with the lightest inferences.
Still Walking(歩いても 歩いても)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Japan · 2008
1h 54m
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring Hiroshi Abe, Kirin Kiki, Yui Natsukawa, Yoshio Harada
Genre Drama, Family
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Twelve years after their beloved eldest son, Junpei, drowned while saving a stranger's life, Kyohei and Toshiko welcome their surviving children home for a family reunion. Younger son Ryota still feels that his parents resent that he isn't the one who died; his new wife, Yukari, is awkwardly meeting the rest of the family for the first time.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Its modest surface belies the depths of a lovely seriocomedy that concisely lays bare all kinds of uncomfortable dynamics in seemingly casual, low-key fashion.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
An usually insightful rendering of an ordinary family, Hirokazu Kore-eda's contemplative Japanese drama is the sort of movie that makes its greatest impact long after you've seen it.
We are in the presence of a new classic.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop.
Quite aside from Shinto transformation parables or Buddhist reincarnation teachings, the final scene shows how family wisdom is conserved and recycled. It's a moment that might elicit a smile or a tear, or perhaps both.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Painful family issues are more likely to stay beneath the surface, known to everyone but not spoken of. Still Walking, a magnificent new film from Japan, is very wise about that, and very true.
Koreeda, talented director that he is, never allows the story to sink into soap-opera melodrama, and he refrains from pointing fingers.
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Kore-eda stated in an interview about Shoplifters that he wanted to further explore the question that prompted his previous film Like Father, Like Son. That question was: What makes a family? It seems that that question permeates all of Kore-eda's films, even this one, which precedes both aforementioned works. This film is delicate and masterfully acted. It is incredibly compelling without venturing into melodrama.