100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The movie has an emotional payoff I failed to anticipate. It expresses hope in human nature. It is one of the year's best films.
A Simple Life (桃姐)
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Hong Kong
- 2011
- · 118m
Director
Ann Hui
Cast
Andy Lau,
Deannie Yip,
Fuli Wang,
Paul Chun Pui,
Leung Tin,
Hui Siu-ying
Genre
Drama
Roger Leung is an unmarried film producer who has lived with Chung Chun-to, his family's domestic worker, for his entire life. One day Chung suffers from a stroke and requests to be moved to a nursing home. As Roger assists Chung, their lengthy relationship deepens and blossoms.
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What are critics saying?
90
The New York Times by Rachel Saltz
Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.
80
Empire by Simon Crook
Director Hui shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema in a tender drama that's illuminated by the marvellous Ip.
80
Time Out London by Trevor Johnston
Lau’s astute performance is rather like the film as a whole – at first you think it’s underdone, but it’s actually cannily judged to favour genuine feeling over pushy sentimentality.
80
Variety by Justin Chang
Suffused with the gentle, unforced humanity viewers have come to expect from Hong Kong helmer Ann Hui, A Simple Life is a tender ode to the elderly, their caregivers and the mutual generosity of spirit that makes their limited time together worthwhile.
75
Washington Post by Mark Jenkins
The movie is often poignant but leavened with humor.
70
Los Angeles Times
Though overlong, Hui's valentine never milks the drama for tears, maintaining an unsentimental focus on the central duo's playful chemistry and the loving way Ah Tao's attention to detail is repaid.
70
Village Voice by Ernest Hardy
A deceptively simple film, gingerly peels layer after layer of sharp insights into the dynamics of familial love, using compassion and droll humor as its tools. Its strength is that it manages to tap genuine emotion without succumbing to sentimentality.
63
Slant Magazine
A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.
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