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100Nobody 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.
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100It's a quietly powerful work, pulsing with gentle humor and a gripping sense of imminent calamity and dread.
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100The film, winsome and tragic at once and finely attuned to the rhythms of childhood, always seems quite close to real life.
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100Yagira's performance is so extraordinary, it won him the best actor prize at the 2004 Cannes film festival.
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100Beautiful, elevating and achingly sad.
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100[The children's] remarkable lack of self-consciousness ... and Kore-eda's quasi-documentary style give this movie a stunning credibility.
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91Moves 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.
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90Unfolds 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.
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90Not 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.
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90Pure and universal.
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90Apart 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.
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90The kids in Nobody Knows are most decidedly not crazy, and we come to care for them to an almost excruciating degree.
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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.
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89Nobody Knows is the rare film that successfully tells its tale of childhood from the children's point of view.
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88There are moments in Yagira's performance that will break your heart.
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88Kore-eda presents the deeply moving story in a documentary style that is both gentle and compelling.
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88Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.
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88Nothing short of mesmerizing.
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88Kore-eda expresses the terror of the kids' predicament with a touch that's equally tender and dispassionate.
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88You won't forget Nobody Knows, the quietly harrowing tale of four abandoned Japanese children.
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80Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's most accessible film to date is also his most wrenching.
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80Kore-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.
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80Loosely 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.
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80It's a heart-sundering vision of preadolescent helplessness that rivals passages of "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ponette."
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80A beautiful but depressing film.
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80Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity, delivering the goods after a seemingly directionless first half.
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80I 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.
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80There 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.
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75Luminous, melancholy and ultimately heartbreaking.
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75Excellent, troubling social commentary based on a true story.
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70Beguiling but long-winded.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 32 out of 36
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Mixed: 2 out of 36
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Negative: 2 out of 36
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DonaldW.2
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JakeB.10Amazing film, I'm pressed for a better way to describe it, but I'm at a loss for words. Absolutely amazing.
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SusanP.10I really enjoyed this movie. The kids were adorable, and the story was emotionally touching.