Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) (2016)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: Our Little Sister uses the story of one fractured family to offer universal -- and deeply moving -- observations on the human condition.
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Cast
as Sachi Koda
as Chika Koda
as Yoshino Koda
as Suzu Asano
as Yoshimi Sakashita
as Dr. Yasuyuki Inoue
as Sanzo Hamada
as Tomoaki Fujii
as Fûta Ozaki
as Hideko Takano
as Yôko Asano
as Sachiko Ninomiya
as Toshio Iida
as Dr. Kazuya Shiina
as Nurse
as Miyako Sasaki
as Masashi Ogata
as Miho Kaneko
as Yoshimi Tokuno
as Shino Yamane
as Fumiyo Kikuchi
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Critic Reviews for Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary)
All Critics (105) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (98) | Rotten (7)
Kore-eda has made a career of family stories focused on youth, some of them heartbreakingly bleak. Here he uses a much lighter brush, creating a picture that is simpler than most, and all the more beautiful for it.
Rarely has a film more eloquently captured the universality of human experience.
Under a less masterful hand, you'd be dying for a fistfight, a sex scene or a gunshot to shatter the calm. But Koreeda makes thrilling the rich inner lives of four young women trying to navigate rocky emotional terrain in the wake of their father's death.
It's a movie that, by its serene final scene, changes its viewer. You leave happier, honored to have been, for two hours, part of this family.
If you succumb to Koreeda's slow rhythms, the climbs up a hill to find a magnificent view, the walks along the beach, the simple peace of a shared meal, this is the kind of movie that will leave you feeling restored, maybe a little misty-eyed as well.
Koreeda allows the action to unfold gradually, and plum wine isn't the only food metaphor enriching his tale. Each meal seems like an invitation for the sisters to learn more about each other or to be reminded-for good or ill-of their parents.
Audience Reviews for Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary)
Despite the charisma and talent of its actresses, Koreeda's film is so uneventful and without a clear focus that it feels dull and uninteresting, failing to offer a reason compelling enough to make us follow a family of sisters who just live together.
Super Reviewer
Literally never thought this would end. It's not a bad movie, not at all. It is beautifully made and the four actresses are completely believable as sisters and have well written personalities. It is just so long at two hours and it plods along with not a lot happening. Three adult sisters take in the teenage half sister they never met following their estranged fathers death. They live in a quiet town and the movie follows the small moments that make up anyone's lives. They go to work, they cook, they go to the local restaurant. There's small moments showing relationships with boyfriends, co workers, their auntie, none of it is all that fleshed out. It's a sweet movie, but it's exceedingly slow and hard to get through. Though I liked it, I was tempted to switch it off at so many points.
Super Reviewer
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