Still Walking

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

2008 / 115min / DCP

Made in the immediate aftermath of Kore-eda’s mother’s decline and death—which the director, who nursed her through the last two years of her life, witnessed in intimate detail—Still Walking is a masterful study of mourning, its action largely occurring in the course of a daylong family gathering over which the anniversary of the passing of an eldest son casts an oppressive pall. One of the great works of 21st-century Japanese cinema, its peerless ensemble including Hiroshi Abe as the inferiority complex-wracked second son, Kirin Kiki as his passive-aggressive mother, and Yoshio Harada as the family’s gruff patriarch.