Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai) Reviews
Top Critic
Nobody Knows will chill you, further proof that the ability to procreate does not automatically qualify you to be a parent.
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| Original Score: 4/5
At its heart, Nobody Knows is a sweet salute to the tenacity and courage of children who are blithely mistreated by adults who should know better and probably do.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This gem from Hirokazu Kore-eda unfolds with the graceful simplicity of a real-life episode turned into a minimalist fable.
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| Original Score: A
Profoundly sad, but it's made with such artistry that it's almost uplifting; you watch it mesmerized, immersed in the strange community the children create.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A genuinely important film.
Kore-eda has an astonishing talent for making us feel the same emotional aches as the kids.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The first great picture to be released this year.
| Original Score: A
It's a quietly powerful work, pulsing with gentle humor and a gripping sense of imminent calamity and dread.
| Original Score: 4/4
Kore-eda balances a visually gritty realism -- the film itself has an almost palpably grainy look -- with unexpected lyrical notes.
It should come as no surprise that teenage actor Yagira won the acting prize at the Cannes film festival last year. Watching him, you'll feel like handing him the trophy yourself.
One of those rare, unexpected movies that gets to you in a way you've never been gotten to before. Never mind tears. It leaves you with a stunned heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Hirokazu Kore-eda has made a film that's almost physically painful to watch. Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Kore-eda is the most gifted of the young Japanese directors.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film, winsome and tragic at once and finely attuned to the rhythms of childhood, always seems quite close to real life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The film's extraordinary power derives from the filmmaker's restraint. Kore-eda is less interested in the obvious moral delinquency behind the incident than in the lives of the children who are condemned to survive it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Kore-eda's filmmaking is austere and deliberate, yet his humanism is manifest in every frame.
Takes us on a journey into the special domain of childhood, a voyage joyous, shattering -- and supremely convincing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The trouble is that with its lengthy running time Nobody Knows becomes grueling and drawn-out.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
I 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.
Akira reminds you of the children who have populated the films of Vittorio De Sica or Satyajit Ray, and, more unexpectedly, of the elderly Carlo Battisti in the title role of De Sica's Umberto D.
The movie's accumulation of little traumas and tiny victories sneaks to a climax that, however unsettling, doesn't upend the movie's alert, steadfast graces.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A movie of quiet melancholy and a pervasive, lonely beauty.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Kore-eda presents the deeply moving story in a documentary style that is both gentle and compelling.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A stately pace and gradual intro suck you into the rhythms of this parallel universe, one in which desperate children live alongside grownups and yet remain invisible.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity.
Calling it an 'issue' film ignores that fact that movies concerned with the fragile reality of childhood are as precious as one-pound pearls.
