Critics reviews

This is a grand choral work, with a panoptic majesty and an emotional amplitude worthy of George Eliot or late Beethoven, whose ‘Song of Joy’ is quoted with the greatest delicacy in Kaili Peng’s piano score.”

It absorbed me whole—I felt like I had _lived_ it, and not just because of its nearly three-hour runtime. "My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies," one character says. "It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life." Yi Yi contains the life cycle through its cast of characters—pregnancy, birth, childhood, a wedding, and a funeral—but it's the way Yang lingers with each one of them that makes this movie feel so lived-in.

Audiences in 2000 were astonished by how fluently Edward Yang's Yi Yi portrays contemporary life through the intermingling stories of members of a Taipei family separated by the dilemmas specific to their stations in life. That's quite ironic, because in today's world of personal alienation through the allure of social media, the film now feels like a period piece, yet somehow, it resonates with an even greater urgency.

[There's] less anger than in Mahjong, Yang's previous picture — leading a few of his older fans to eye this movie with some suspicion, as if the iconoclastic filmmaker had somehow gone soft. Yet the undertow of tragic separateness between the characters in Yi Yi may be even more pronounced than the divisions in his other features — a separateness the comedy may momentarily distract us from without ever diminishing.

Yang, who demonstrated energy a-plenty in 1994's superior A Confucian Confusion, here resolutely avoids any hint of intensity, and the result is an undifferentiated mass of low-key excellence. Plus, hate to say it, but certain formal strategies that once seemed daring and evocative are rapidly becoming arthouse clichés.