Recensioni de* critic*

Hirokazu Koreeda's bittersweet comedy about three generations of a Japanese family is a gentle delight... For her part, Kiki is wonderful – her performance as the wisecracking granny is almost too broad for the laconic naturalism of the rest of the film, but rather than unbalance each scene, she somehow manages to galvanise them.

The movie finds astonishing nuance, strangeness and often hilarity in situations where life is at its most heart-rending. Among its range of thematic touchpoints are the sudden death of a parent... the realisation that you will never be as great or successful as you were destined to be, the acceptance of your part in the unraveling of a marriage which has undoubtedly scarred your estranged child for life. Yes, it does sound depressing as hell on paper, but it really isn't.

Where many a contemporary reputation is built on an appearance of daring covering a hedged-bet complacency, Koreeda's lovable, poignant little films are, conversely, more difficult viewing than at first blush they might appear. This charmer is a catalogue of the quotidian humiliations endured by a middle-aged child, scruffing up an expensive pair of cleats for his son so he can swing a discount... If any of this can be called reassuring, it's the cold comfort of saying, "It's only life, anyway."

Kore-eda looks sensitively at the deep roots of unquenched anguish, but he constructs the characters too neatly and the situations too precisely for the drama to seem like anything but a well-meaning lesson. His calm and precise images stick close to the script, divulging its meaning at once and leaving little room for thought and wonder.

...The movie brilliantly deconstructs this self-destructive cycle over time. It patiently strips away male delusions of grandeur and focuses intensely on the responsibility of being mindful. "I wonder why it is men can't love the present," Yoskiko rhetorically asks late in the film. With this comment she essentially becomes a proxy for Kore-eda himself, who has spent his entire career reminding audiences to live in the moment. It's a poignant lesson that bears repeating over and over again.

Kore-eda brings a similar warmth to his deeply flawed characters, allowing all of them moments of humor amid the melancholy, viewing them with a compassion that never strays into the sentimental. There are no extreme reversals for these characters at the end, only the incremental yet valuable progress that comes with accepting one's lot in life and making a conscious effort to improve it.

Watch and listen closely and worlds of deeply felt, awkwardly expressed passion will unfold in and around a cramped apartment in a nondescript high-rise that has aged along with the inhabitants who raised families there... As always, Kor-eda offers little by way of plot. Instead he builds the dynamic between his characters out of an accumulating wealth of seemingly banal detail.

The structure of After The Storm approximates two episodes of TV, with a first half that's built like a pilot, and a second like a draggy bottle episode, with the primary cast holed up in Yoshiko's apartment during a typhoon. One can't help but think that this opening hour is more memorable; its plays Koreeda's mildness and resistance to external conflict against his jealous protagonist, who seems to catch break after break only to screw up again.

Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include "Still Walking" (2009) and "Like Father, Like Son" (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, "After the Storm" is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.

The emotions burbling beneath the film's surface are tremendous, but kept at bay by the bittersweet ironies of daily life: Over the course of one long night, all four characters have betrayed wildly different expectations for how the tempest will shake out.

The results are uneven, ranging from the spellbinding to the overly familiar. After the Storm tips so far toward the latter that it's hard to glean much enjoyment or insight from its unwaveringly polite, carefully modulated story of a family in not-quite crisis. Understatement, restraint, and quiet wisdoms are usually virtues, but even they can become grating through sheer overuse.

[The second half is] set during a typhoon that has forced them to wait out the night at Grandma's Tokyo apartment and confront their simmering conflicts...Before this productive standstill, the first half of the film has a more conventional forward motion... If these early passages feel uncommonly unmoored for Kore-eda, it's because he's at his best in moments of togetherness, an artist who believes in the power of family without advocating for a return to the womb.