The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Boy Erased
Ant-Man and the Wasp
American Vandal
Log in with Facebook
OR
By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies, and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango.
Please enter your email address and we will email you a new password.
Critics Consensus: Our Little Sister uses the story of one fractured family to offer universal -- and deeply moving -- observations on the human condition.
Critic Consensus: Our Little Sister uses the story of one fractured family to offer universal -- and deeply moving -- observations on the human condition.
View All Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) News
All Critics (109) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (102) | 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.
It really is filmmaking at the highest pitch of intelligence: a work teeming with skill both cinematographically and dramaturgically.
When its repressed emotions finally come to the surface, it's devastating.
Our Little Sister, a lovely example of vintage Kore-eda, explores tensions great and small that exist between different generations of a fractured family.
"Our Little Sister" has one foot in 20th-century Japan, another in a new world that seems to be forming. It's often engaging, but just as often awkward and misshapen.
Never shying away from the picturesque, the film depicts a vivid world that is crystal clear, gleaming, and suffused with life.
Like his other films, Our Little Sister never draws attention to itself (or to its maker's understated brilliance).
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.
There are no approved quotes yet for this movie.
200 Essential Movies
Chosen by RT staff!
200 Freshest Movies
The best-reviewed since 1998
30 Great Scenes
30 great scenes in Rotten movies
Best of Netflix
Movies and shows to binge now
More News & Features
View All