I needed this.

Aside from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hirokazu Kore-eda is perhaps the only director whose films can completely put me at ease. For two hours, the world slows down and I am allowed to silently communicate with the wealth of subtleties and softly spoken truths a Kore-eda picture holds. Still Walking is no different. It's serene, patient and quiet. In saying these things, I am of course tiptoeing around the most obvious descriptor of all, which is "delicate." Delicacy is a quality that graces all of Kore-eda's work, but there's something different here. There's a void at the center of the film- a massive hole left by the early departure of a loved one. We see it in shots of…

Still Walking to me almost feels like Hirokazu Kore-eda's Tokyo Story tribute, with enough personal trademarks, modernized elements, and as much heart and soul as the classic. It's 2 hours of minimal, extremely personal retelling of family issues through the everyday, mundane existence. Without a sensational story a la Nobody Knows or The Shoplifters, this is arguably Kore-eda's best and most heartfelt work so far.

Still Walking details a middle-aged man's reluctant visit to his parents, when he and his father doesn't have the best relationship in the world. Based on Kore-eda's own life story, Still Walking shares some of the most common types of family dramas you've seen in Japanese cinema, yet Kore-eda made the whole thing transfixing, with…

Kore-eda's films are like poetry to me, saying so much through life’s simplest of moments. Life is in the smallest of details, whether it be the slowly dying flower in a cup of water on the dinner table or the broken tiles in the bathroom... It’s all bursting with life, with memories and with times to come. Everything has a story to tell and Kore-eda gives us those stories.

I genuinely don’t know a better director than Kore-eda when it comes to presenting people and their lives on film. The way his characters interact with each other and how we can see and feel what they’re feeling through the smallest of gestures or utterances of dialogue is so real and…

Five minutes after we started watching this film, my partner said "This is a live-action Hayao Miyazaki movie." He was right, too. While in places, the story gets darker and more emotionally fraught than Miyazaki (especially in the best scene, where a mother speaks frankly and chillingly about her opinion of the "useless" boy her oldest son died while rescuing), a great deal of the film feels like it could be translated into Ghibli animation without missing a beat. Technically, it's one of those nearly-single-set family dramas with a bunch of people coming together for a shared holiday and living out their familiar old dramas, with a few new catharses: the kind of story that usually feels like a stage…