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All About Lily Chou-Chou (Riri Shushu no subete)

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Riri Shushu no subete) (2001)

tomatometer

69

Average Rating: 7.1/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 4

No consensus yet.

audience

87

liked it
Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 7,841

My Rating

Movie Info

Wildly popular filmmaker Shunji Iwai breaks a three-year hiatus following his less than successful April Story with this elliptical drama about teenaged alienation, violence, and celebrity. The film centers on Yuichi Hasumi (Hayato Ichihara), an eighth grader who lives in a sleepy town in rural Japan with his mother, her boyfriend, and the boyfriend's son. At school he is beaten up and harassed by his former friend Hoshino. In order to scrape up the cash to meet Hoshino's daily extortion demand,

Feb 15, 2005

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All Critics (46) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (26) | Rotten (12) | DVD (7)

For all of its insights into the dream world of teen life, and its electronic expression through cyber culture, the film gives no quarter to anyone seeking to pull a cohesive story out of its 2 1/2-hour running time.

March 21, 2003 Full Review Source: Toronto Star
Toronto Star
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This movie is maddening. It conveys a simple message in a visual style that is willfully overwrought.

November 29, 2002 Full Review Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
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Once you get into its rhythm ... the movie becomes a heady experience.

November 15, 2002 Full Review Source: San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
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A hypnotic cyber hymn and a cruel story of youth culture.

September 20, 2002 Full Review Source: Boston Globe
Boston Globe
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While the story's undeniably hard to follow, Iwai's gorgeous visuals seduce.

August 30, 2002 Full Review Source: Seattle Times
Seattle Times
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Bravura, ambitious and profoundly disturbing. It is also a daunting, demanding experience, one whose complex structure makes it a challenge to track despite literate subtitles.

August 16, 2002 Full Review Source: Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
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It is remarkable not for its flamboyance but for its stark honesty, captivating visual flair, and a style of filmmaking that differs from anything on this side of the Pacific.

June 21, 2007 Full Review Source: Film Scouts
Film Scouts

The gutsy film didn't help itself by making it so difficult to follow the story and by being so morose.

January 6, 2003 Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

One thing is for sure: This movie does not tell you a whole lot about Lily Chou-Chou.

November 15, 2002 Full Review Source: Combustible Celluloid
Combustible Celluloid

I'm not sure All About Lily Chou-Chou made sense in my head, but it made sense in my heart.

October 25, 2002 Full Review Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press
St. Paul Pioneer Press

Confusion is one of my least favourite emotions, especially when I have to put up with 146 minutes of it.

October 8, 2002

A difficult, absorbing film that manages to convey more substance despite its repetitions and inconsistencies than do most films than are far more pointed and clear.

September 27, 2002 Full Review Source: Oregonian
Oregonian

Audience Reviews for All About Lily Chou-Chou (Riri Shushu no subete)

First off, All About Lily Chou-Chou looks beautiful. It's switching from digital to 35mm is brilliant, the direction, cinematography and editing is great, as is the non-linear narrative. The music is also suitably haunting, an important thing to get right considering the subject matter - I still can't get that 'I see you, you see me' song out of my head. It's only real problem, and unfortunately it's a big one, is that it drags on for far too long and, well, how do I put this, no one does teenage angst as unconvincingly as the Japanese. Harsh I know, but I just can't stand Japanese high-school dramas - I find them annoying and unrealistic. Shame really, as this film was so nearly a five star film!
April 23, 2012
SirPant

Super Reviewer

Shunji Iwai's artsy teen angst mess feels like amateur film-maker trying to make his work artier by shooting long takes of sky, fields and using classical music in the soundtrack. It's resembles me more of a parody of "art" film. And talk about editing. This film is just way too overlong. It would worked as a 90-minute film or a short-film but now it is just ass numbing two and a half that goes absolutely nowhere.
January 7, 2012
emilkakko

Super Reviewer

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Foreign Titles

  • All About Lily Chou-Chou (DE)
  • All About Lily Chou-Chou (UK)
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