Toronto. Still Walking.

"I lost track of the number of times I smiled or laughed in recognition during Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film entitled Still Walking," writes Bob Turnbull.

"It's a gentle laughter to be sure, but it's very real and honest."

"This is exactly the kind of film - quiet, modest, untroubled by ambitions of importance - that risks being lost in the news media shuffle," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And yet it is so completely absorbing, so sure of its own scale and scope that while you're watching it the rest of the world fades into irrelevance."

"After the widely panned Hana, Kore-eda returns to the quality he established with Nobody Knows and After Life," writes J Robert Parks at Daily Plastic. "The film's joys, of which there are many, revolve around the universal elements of family. Even though Still Walking takes place in contemporary Japan, you'll recognize your own parents, your own siblings, your own children and nieces and nephews. The way families love and bicker, the way they laugh and tease.... The atmosphere of Ozu permeates the film, though Kore-eda has little interest in adopting the master's style. Instead, it's the quietness and the movie's humanity, along with a few visual motifs, that make the connection."

"Between this film, Rachel Getting Married and Summer Hours, it's been quite the fest for subtle dramas about the ties that bind until they sting," writes Noel Murray. "Particularly noteworthy is the performance of Kirin Kiki as the sweet-faced matriarch, constantly making food or handing out gifts, while also making some of the most inadvertently cruel comments of anyone in the family."

Also at the AV Club, Scott Tobias: "That it's set almost entirely in a single household makes it seem cramped and airless, and Kore-eda's one stab at poeticism (warning: symbolic butterfly) lands with a thud. Better direction and a few fewer endings, and this one might have been a masterpiece."

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2008 2:47 PM