The Essentials: Yi Yi (2000)
Each member of a middle-class Taipei family seeks to reconcile past and present relationships within their daily lives. (NR, 173 min.)
Showtimes
Sunday, March 5, 2023
(TBD)
Monday, March 6, 2023
(TBD)
Each member of a middle-class Taipei family seeks to reconcile past and present relationships within their daily lives. (NR, 173 min.)
(TBD)
(TBD)
The Essentials: Contemporary Asian Cinema
Free for Members
The extraordinary, internationally embraced Yi Yi (A One and a Two . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Whether chronicling middle-age father NJ’s tentative flirtations with an old flame or precocious young son Yang-Yang’s attempts at capturing reality with his beloved camera, the filmmaker deftly imbues every gorgeous frame with a compassionate clarity. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century. [Criterion]
Starring: Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issei Ogata
Director: Edward Yang
Languages: Japan, Taiwan
Genre(s): Drama, Romance, Music
"Generous, soulful film."
— Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly
"A marvel of delicacy and humor."
— Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
"Great, bittersweet family drama."
— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"Chances are, you'll watch most of it with a smile on your face, and you'll miss these characters when it's over."
— Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle
"Yang favors a gentle and introspective style that shows how deep and strong everyday emotions can run. A memorable treat."
— David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
"In its low-key way, Yi Yi presents an intelligent, profound and at times heartrending slice of Taiwanese middle-class existence."
— Jonathan Foreman, New York Post
"The one movie so far this year that every filmgoer should see, if only to get a big dose of what we've been missing from Hollywood."
— Michael Atkinson, Mr. Showbiz
"An amazing experience: as if a TV soap opera, packed with the usual catastrophes, were done with unaccustomed depth and real storytelling genius."
— Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune
"One of the year's best: a rich, funny, enormously humane portrait of a middle-class Taipei family in the throes of romantic, economic and spiritual upheaval. [2000]"
— David Ansen, Newsweek
"Wise, delicate and impeccably performed, Yi Yi is a three- hour drama that looks at one middle-class family in transition -- and does so with such a kind and probing eye that we all see our lives reflected through Yang's lens."
— Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle
"It's a magical film -- an exquisitely made and exceedingly wise family drama that communicates a touching sense of the universality of the human condition, and leaves us with the rich emotional satisfaction we just don't seem to get often at the movies anymore."
— William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"A humanistic masterwork. The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness."
— Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine