Critic Rating
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Director
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cast
Sakda Kaewbuadee,
Jenjira Pongpas,
Thanapat Saisaymar,
Natthakarn Aphaiwonk,
Geerasak Kulhong,
Wallapa Mongkolprasert,
Kanokporn Tongaram
Genre
Comedy,
Drama,
Fantasy
Suffering from kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.
This film thoughtfully addresses death and faith, and masterfully traverses genres while tracing a throughline, but not quite reaching a thesis. In its realistic moments, it depicts life as we live it and doesn’t try to artificially make small moments and familial bonds more moving or meaningful than the individual audience member will inevitably find them
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.
IndieWire by Eric Kohn
The magic of Uncle Boonmee is that it makes all viewers feel like the strange ones.
Time Out by Keith Uhlich
What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?
Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek
If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this remarkable drama.
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
I can't pretend to understand the intricacies of the Buddhist belief system that informs the surreal story, or the fantasy system in which Boonmee, embodying Thailand, recalls his nation's history and shimmering myths. Yet no effort of understanding is needed to be moved by Boonmee's descent into a limestone cave shaped like a womb.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
What is clear is that this is a director with a great sense of the magical and the mystical residing in the everyday.
NPR by Ella Taylor
You don't have to believe in the transmigration of souls to fall languorously in love with the Thai film that won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
Encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
As Joe blurs the line between reality and the supernatural, his haunting and hypnotic film exerts a hold you don't want to break. It's a beauty.
Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe
A whimsical essay about the final days of a villager suffering from kidney failure it is undoubtedly one of the filmmaker's most accessible works.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Uncle Boonmee is entrancing-and also, if you're not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing.
Empire
A gentle trance-out and the strangest Palme d'Or winner in a while.
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