Metacritic reviews

We are in the presence of a new classic.

The movie seems like a perfect found object, as if it had always existed and was just waiting to be uncovered.

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.

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.

Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem.

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.

Kore-eda listens to his characters' inner thoughts with the attentiveness of a piano tuner, and reveals them with the lightest inferences.

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.

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.

Koreeda, talented director that he is, never allows the story to sink into soap-opera melodrama, and he refrains from pointing fingers.