CNET Networks Entertainment GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

83 Alexandra
80 Band's Visit, The
76 Beauty in Trouble
47 Bella
80 Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
59 Blind Mountain
55 Bra Boys
60 Brick Lane
70 Caramel
49 Children of Huang Shi, The
83 Chop Shop
83 Chris & Don. A Love Story
78 Counterfeiters, The
52 Diminished Capacity
64 Dreams with Sharp Teeth
73 Duchess of Langeais, The
84 Edge of Heaven, The
52 Elsa & Fred
79 Encounters at the End of the World
62 Expired
64 Fall, The
51 Finding Amanda
57 Flawless
86 Flight of the Red Balloon, The
63 Foot Fist Way, The
60 Fugitive Pieces
45 Full Grown Men
55 Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
69 Go-Getter, The
74 Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
63 Gunnin for that #1 Spot
68 Heartbeat Detector
34 Holding Trevor
68 Honeydripper
55 Irina Palm
69 Jellyfish
60 Jihad for Love, A
68 Kabluey
62 Kiss the Bride
63 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
82 Last Mistress, The
38 Life Before Her Eyes, The
70 Love Songs
64 Married Life
30 Meet Bill
33 Miss Conception
53 Mister Lonely
74 Mongol
52 Mother of Tears, The
52 My Blueberry Nights
71 My Brother Is an Only Child
84 My Winnipeg
61 On the Rumba River
69 Operation Filmmaker
61 OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
83 Paranoid Park
72 Priceless
51 Promotion, The
55 Quid Pro Quo
29 Red Roses and Petrol
79 Reprise
71 Roman de gare
56 Sangre de mi sangre
51 Savage Grace
76 Shotgun Stories
66 Son of Rambow
70 Standard Operating Procedure
62 Stuck
72 Surfwise
81 Tell No One
56 Then She Found Me
xx Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
71 To the Limit
54 Tracey Fragments, The
70 Trumbo
72 Tuya's Marriage
83 U2 3D
56 Unknown Woman
86 Up the Yangtze
79 Visitor, The
62 Wackness, The
37 War, Inc.
64 Water Lilies
66 When Did You Last See Your Father?
55 Without the King
72 Woman on the Beach
64 XXY
67 Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
75 Young@Heart

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Nobody Knows
IFC Films

Nobody Knows reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 88 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
8.9 out of 10
based on 31 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 48 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for mature thematic elements and some sexual references

Starring Yûya Yagira, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu, Hanae Kan, You, Kazumi Kushida, and Yukiko Okamoto

Set in Tokyo, this is an exceptional story of a makeshift family of children left to survive in an urban jungle. (IFC Films)


GENRE(S): Drama  |  Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Hirokazu Koreeda  
DIRECTED BY: Hirokazu Koreeda  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: September 13, 2005 
Theatrical: February 4, 2005 
RUNNING TIME: 141 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: Japan 
LANGUAGE(S): Japanese (with English subtitles) 

Original title "Dare mo shiranai"; Best Actor (Yagira), 2004 Cannes Film Festival

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Yagira's performance is so extraordinary, it won him the best actor prize at the 2004 Cannes film festival.
Read Full Review
100
San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer
The film, winsome and tragic at once and finely attuned to the rhythms of childhood, always seems quite close to real life.
Read Full Review
100
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Nobody Knows, by the often excellent Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, is one of those special movies that can give us a new way of seeing.
Read Full Review
100
Washington Post Desson Thomson
[The children's] remarkable lack of self-consciousness ... and Kore-eda's quasi-documentary style give this movie a stunning credibility.
Read Full Review
100
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's a quietly powerful work, pulsing with gentle humor and a gripping sense of imminent calamity and dread.
Read Full Review
100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Beautiful, elevating and achingly sad.
Read Full Review
91
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Moves at a stately pace; it's a long film, to boot. But there's real drama and pathos in the story, in the blend of matter-of-factness and potential catastrophe, in the depiction of innocence imperiled.
Read Full Review
90
Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.
Read Full Review
90
Slate David Edelstein
Pure and universal.
Read Full Review
90
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Apart from a singer named You who plays Keiko, the members of the cast are non-professionals. You may find that hard to believe when you see this astonishing film, as I hope you will.
90
LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children's long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope.
Read Full Review
90
The New York Times Dana Stevens
Not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy.
Read Full Review
90
Chicago Reader Jim Healy
Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor award at Cannes this year, is superb as the protective eldest child; he and his other nonprofessional costars are quietly heartbreaking.
Read Full Review
89
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Nobody Knows is the rare film that successfully tells its tale of childhood from the children’s point of view.
Read Full Review
88
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
You won't forget Nobody Knows, the quietly harrowing tale of four abandoned Japanese children.
Read Full Review
88
Boston Globe Ty Burr
Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.
Read Full Review
88
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.
Read Full Review
88
New York Post V.A. Musetto
Kore-eda presents the deeply moving story in a documentary style that is both gentle and compelling.
Read Full Review
88
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
There are moments in Yagira's performance that will break your heart.
Read Full Review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole
Nothing short of mesmerizing.
Read Full Review
80
The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
There is not much progress in the film: actions are repeated and repeated...Yet the film is sustained--and, for the most part, well sustained--by the children.
Read Full Review
80
Salon.com Charles Taylor
Kore-eda doesn't create the simultaneous sense of being destroyed and exalted that the greatest humanist movies do, but he's stayed true to his title.
Read Full Review
80
Variety Derek Elley
Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
Read Full Review
80
The New Yorker Anthony Lane
I certainly came out of Nobody Knows feeling numb; only later, reflecting on the fact that the movie was inspired by a true story, did it occur to me that the numbness could have been deliberate, and that what suffused this picture was a mist of anger.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice Michael Atkinson
It's a heart-sundering vision of preadolescent helplessness that rivals passages of "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ponette."
Read Full Review
80
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Loosely structured around four seasons, Nobody Knows unfolds in a long series of episodes that slowly progress from lightly comic to bracingly sad as the situation deteriorates.
Read Full Review
80
TV Guide Ken Fox
Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's most accessible film to date is also his most wrenching.
Read Full Review
80
Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer
A beautiful but depressing film.
Read Full Review
75
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Luminous, melancholy and ultimately heartbreaking.
Read Full Review
75
New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Excellent, troubling social commentary based on a true story.
Read Full Review
70
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
Beguiling but long-winded.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 8.9 (out of 10) based on 48 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Jack L. gave it a10:
This movie is strangely mesmerizing and heartbreaking. There was no drama, no crying in the movie but I have endured one of the most intensely painful experience. Powerful movie!!! The movie is well acted and directed. There is no wasted moment in the whole 141 minutes. Every scene is well chosen and has its own effect to the audiences. There are some silent scenes in which the camera just stays still, capturing the very normal, unnoticed things of their life; and these scenes are precious. The ones who call this movie "boring" watch too many typical, bomb-blowing, gun-firing Hollywood drama. The repetition of the film IS THE POINT!!! That's how life is. Look at your life for a second. Is that what life is, a series of repetitive thing: we get up in the morning, we eat breakfast, we go to work/ school, and then we go home, we have dinner, we sleep and then we wake up again the next morning. These children and their life is portrayed beautifully real. It is NOT BORING!!! It is mesmerizing and heartbreaking. Those who say it boring, again, watch too much cheesy Hollywood film. What do they expect? A car accident? A gun-fire? A murder? The thieves get in to their apartment? Look at your life. These things don't come around as often as they do in Hollywood films. This movie is emotionally exhausted but it is never a waste to experience something like this. POWERFUL. Oh, and to Potechi who finds it is unbelievable to have a junior high/ high school outsider join the kids, I just want to say that for me, it is totally believable. You cannot use your cynical, protective, and doubtful sense of the adult to try to make sense the kid's world. Look at the details in the movie or the children who play at any park in real life. They play together. They laugh together. Only the adults are the one who are lonely, cynical, isolated and masked. The movie is utterly real and precious. A MUST SEE. What you experience in the movie maybe is what the four kids are experiencing themselves. The movie puts you in their life and make you experience it. So if you feel mind-numbing or bored or curious (about the mother) or heartbroken or emotionally drained or repressed, I think it would probably be what the children are enduring. Hope you will appreciate it.

Rich Y. gave it a10:
The writer/director used his creative license to embellish the actual event and made it even more tragic and heartwrenching. But the fact remains that this is a stunning piece of work that needs to be witnessed. As other reviewers noted, I was completely immersed in the film I that the hours went unnoticed as well as the "acting" by these children. It was a very emotionally exhausting cinematic experience but it was also one of the most beautifully told stories I'd ever seen in my life.

Potechi gave it a6:
The movie was good but could've used some serious cutting. The film also lost it's realism near the end for me because of the children's unnatural, unwavering behaviour. It's pushing it already to think that the 3 siblings would act in this certain manner but adding a juniorhigh/highschool outsider to the bunch makes it the more unbelievable.

Brent C. gave it a10:
I just rented this movie. I was overwelmed with emotions. I couldnt stop crying at times. I felt like I was with them going thru the same pain. It is now one of the best films I have ever seen.

Danh N. gave it a10:
I just watched this movie and man was it great... it isn't your normal movie. If you want a movie with action this isn't it. It was slow and calm all the way through the two hours and twenty-one minutes. But it showed how these kids grew up and bonded... its a must see if you like eastern style movies.

Winifred A gave it a10:
I happened to catch this film on cable several nights ago. In a word, it's ‘gripping.’ It is one of those rare films that will resonate deep within your psyche. One of the most moving films I've ever seen in my life. I understand that the young actor won an award in Cannes - well deserved. But how tragic that this was based on true events, and even more tragic that such events continue to happen in our world.

Pete J. gave it an8:
A must-see for fans of Japanese movies an incredible movie

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: World News | Fantasy Football | Amy Winehouse | Baseball | E3 | Batman | Firefox 3 | iPhone 3G

About CNET Networks | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CNET Networks, Inc., a CBS Company. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use